Broadband ireland wtf

xjr400

Good Morning fellow ranters,

my rant today is about broadband, i mean seriously what the hell.

My peronsal situation.

I run a business situated in cork. To this date we've had 4 downtimes in 6 months lasting from 1 to 3 days in each occasion.
My business is dependant on broadband and obviously this is not right.

I need at least 3 megs up and down in order to adequatley provide the business im providing.

I've tried Irish broadband (3 up / 3 down) and Nova networks(cork based fixed wireless) (3 up / 3 down)
Both serices are patchy at best.

Now i appreciate peoples views on each service, but please don't start flaming me on how great these services are because i have the loss of revenue in the thousands of euros to prove that these services are not up to standard.

My question is who, where and how do i get a decent service????

DublinWriter

That kind of bandwidth is a little ambitious on wirless.

Have you looked at Eircom's commercial broadband service?

GarfieldConnoll

Cork city? What exchange?

Garfield.

xjr400 wrote:

I'm a manager of a business situated in cork.

xjr400

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Cork city? What exchange?
Garfield.

Irish Broadband (R & H Hall)
Nova Networks (Churchfield?? Colins's Barracks area)

zuma

xjr400 wrote:

Irish Broadband (R & H Hall)
Nova Networks (Churchfield?? Colins's Barracks area)

I think he was suggesting which telephone exchange are you near as Smart might be able to help you ...possibly with 2m/2m or if technically available then mabue 3m/3m SDSL???

xjr400

due to the nature of my business smart telecom aren't offering the kind of service i need,

their contention is 20:1
where as im currently paying for a 2:1 contention which is costing me 500 a month

GarfieldConnoll

xjr400 wrote:

due to the nature of my business smart telecom aren't offering the kind of service i need,
their contention is 20:1
where as im currently paying for a 2:1 contention which is costing me 500 a month

Smart don't operate a contended network..............blah, blah, blah (position can be read elsewhere on boards.ie)

Are you on the Churchfield exchange? Do you require a synchronous service, or is this just a nice to have?

Garfield.

oscarBravo

GarfieldConnoll wrote:

Do you require a synchronous service, or is this just a nice to have?

Aaaarrghh!! Symmetric, the word is symmetric. I hate that!!

Blaster99

If you require good upload speed and don't want to spend a fortune, I would think Irish Broadband is the best bet (on paper). I know from my own personal experience that they wouldn't know what a decent service was if it hit them in the head. What I would recommend is to get ADSL as backup (from Smart or whoever) and use the ADSL for automatic failover. Most half-decent routers will support this. So the upload will go to crapland whenever Irish Broadband's service fails on you, but at least you have some connectivity. Depending on your router's capabilities, you can also load-balance the two connections for download.

I'm pretty sure Digiweb will be in Cork soon as well, and they offer better upload speeds than ADSL but not as good as Irish Broadband. They will not necessarily offer a more reliable service.

gline

man IBB are so weird, im some areas they are pretty good, but in other areas they are really bad, personally ive had no problem with them , but know ppl that have. What did they say about the dropped connections on a 2:1 line?? You'd think you'd get a good connecton paying that kind of doh. Does their contract not state anything about downtime, like refund etc?

Illkillya

Indeed, the selection in Cork is patchy - check out http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=295941 which illustrates how few your options are, even in the city.

Unless you're forking out thousands for a leased line, then you'll have to take the hit on downtime occasionally. 4 downtimes in 6 months sounds fairly bad, especially if they were all prolonged downtimes, but you will never get 100% uptime on any service.

So in 6 months, even if you had a total of 48 full hours downtime, thats still 98.888% uptime. The key is, keep an exact track of downtime, make sure when you lose your connection to the internet - even if its for 10 minutes - you mark down in a journal the second you lose it, and you mark it again when you get it back. Phone your ISP and ask for the reason for the downtime and mark it in the journal too for reference. This way you have a record to your ISP to show if they're not holding their end of the bargain. At €500 per month, I assume you have a tailor made contract, perhaps there is a promised % uptime in it?

Having said that, a full day downtime, let alone 3 days downtime is completely unacceptable. I know Irish Broadband had a downtime lasting several days recently and that kind of service is plain ridiculous. I'm reluctant to recommend Irish Broadband to home users, let alone businesses - either they don't care about your business or they're so incompetent that they can't support it.

I don't agree with DublinWriter - I see no reason why 3mb/3mb is a lot for wireless. Since you seem to be sticking to the wireless, I'll assume you need the big upload.

My advice: phone up Leap, ask for a quote. Phone up Digiweb, and ask for a quote. Skip Amocom because I hear they're a bit of a disaster. Phone up Nova Networks, ask to talk to the manager and explain the situation, re-negotiate the contract if necessary to quote a % uptime and maybe have some insurance clause to refund business lost if they don't meet this requirement.

I don't know anyone in Cork who has Leap DSL, but iirc, a couple of people on boards.ie - quozl / DeVore - had it, and they were happy with it last I spoke to them (3 or 4 years ago )? Similarly with Digiweb - find someone who has it, get a reference, find out how reliable it has been for them and how good the support is. My gut instinct would be to stick with/go back to Nova Networks: a smaller company and Cork based, chances are they're more likely to care about your business than Leap or Digiweb.

No matter which company you go with, get a backup connection, some cheap Eircom home DSL package for 40euro a month or whatever so at least you're not completely screwed if theres an outage.