Huge problems with Smart BB

johncorleone

JNive wrote:

points 1, 2 and 3 are exactly what i was saying, you just agreed esentially.
They need to go through other to get to Level3.
Its the behaviour of who they peer with, and not Smart

You seem to have missed the point, as far as the customer is concerned (and rightly so) it is the behaviour of Smart. The customer is not interested in who Smart peers with, they want a reliable, quick service.

JNive wrote:

X means they do not peer directly, although have a consistent routing poilcy, again what i was saying, based on that chart.

X means that the published routing policy of both members indicates that they don't peer. This does not mean that they definitely do not peer with each other. The matrix is not an authoritative source.

JNive

1. Yes i know, im just saying where the cause is and that it isnt 'smart is routing my traffic to the US', thats all.
2.correct, but its the best information available.

romperstomper

as far as the customer is concerned (me in this case) the fault lies directly with smart. it is not good enough to say that they don't peer with colt and thus my traffic bound for level3 gets routed to the US. They should set up whatever peering arrangements their customers need ffs. I have had to become au fait with about 10 different routing terminologies just to get a straight answer out of Smart as to why my pings were so high.

Imagine how much luck a home user would have had by ringing up and saying "my ping is bad on Smart but was OK on Eircom (or whoever), why is this?"

Still not paying that bill til they sort it

F-Corp

The majority of people who pay for broadband in an Irish household are not gamers and hence have no interest in ping times.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

So what if little jimmy cant play his best game, dad can still stream his Pr0n.

romperstomper

whoever pays the bill is irrelevant. point of the thread is that my Smart experience has been less than satisfactory and I have been given the runaround by them so often that my confidence in them to provide good service is nil.

how would you know how many bill payers play games or not?

the needs of the many or the few have nothing to do with the price of fish. This thread was started because of poor customer service.

Blub2k4

romperstomper wrote:

whoever pays the bill is irrelevant. point of the thread is that my Smart experience has been less than satisfactory and I have been given the runaround by them so often that my confidence in them to provide good service is nil.

how would you know how many bill payers play games or not?

the needs of the many or the few have nothing to do with the price of fish. This thread was started because of poor customer service.

Pity Garfield is on holidays he would sort the problem out for you.
I find the Smart service to be excellent when we got over the sign-up problems (Eircom) at the start.

romperstomper

i agree, i have full confidence in Garfield and he was activately involved in the trouble before he went away (i even received a msg from him on the day he was to fly out - pity his colleagues are not as reliable). This again highlights the problem with Smart. They cannot rely on 1 person to carry the can for all the customer service. GC was on hols so someone else should have contacted me with updates etc. Did it happen? Did it hell

bk

F-Corp wrote:

The majority of people who pay for broadband in an Irish household are not gamers and hence have no interest in ping times.

And how do you know that, I haven't seen any stats or surveys that give any indication what people in Ireland use BB for. However the IOFFL survey should have interesting data on this.

While this is purely a guess, I'd say that a large percentage of BB users are actually gamers. This is because of the relatively high price of BB and the fact that BB is still in the "early adopter" stage and it still hasn't reached the "mainstream" stage.

Early adopters would tend to be sufisticated users and are likely gamers. Add in the fact that Irish people love gaming (Ireland has the highest, per capita, owenership of Playstation 2's in the world) and the fact that all the new game consoles have BB capabilities and online gaming makes up a big part of their strategy, I expect online gaming will become one of the major uses of BB in Ireland, if it isn't already.

Also Smart should be interested in gamers in particular, the mainstream, non gaming public are more then likely going to go for Eircom BB, it is well informed gamers and other high end BB users who are more likely to know about Smart and be interested in their high speed products.

kin9pin

fatmander wrote:

I am using netsource for year and a half now, 3 Mb/256, approx €105 per month(incl vat). no complaints, good service and support(real people on the other end of the phone, not the 'I'm sorry' eircom answering machine.

Smart offer 4Mb/512 for approx €145 per month(incl vat)
and you get a free, yes thats free phone line.
(I will be switching when they come to naas)

Sounds rather expensive to me, even with free line rental.
NTL 3Mb/300 €45pm (incl vat), great service, never needed support, + €25pm line rental to UTVTalk with free evening/weekend calls to Ireland/UK....a bargain

Blub2k4

Hmmm I am at home now and I see that my speed is actually at 1.15Mb according to irishisptest which is actually the site that Garfield always recommends as a test site. The excuse from the support staff doesn't wash tbh.
Well lets wait on garfield.

Blub2k4

hmmm am not sure anymore, irishisptest used to be correct but I am downloading at the correct speed from esat.net
weird

machalla

Irishisptest is having some problems of late at least from the point of view of Smart and speed tests. I mentioned it to Garfield before he went on holidays and he said it wasn't showing the corect results. He suggested this as an alternative.

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/

No major problems with smart so far that haven't been sorted out. Definitely recommend Smart based on the fact that Garfield and a couple of others in there have done their best to sort problems out and make amends where there was a problem. No qualms about recommending them on this basis.

Although I am a little concerned by the fact that Smart recently poached Eircoms BB sales team (or at least the management). Its scary if they are an improvement...

TimTim

Blub2k4 wrote:

hmmm am not sure anymore, irishisptest used to be correct but I am downloading at the correct speed from esat.net
weird

I explained it in a post earlier but I can't find it anymore without search

It basically has to do with peering agreements at INEX and backhaul providers.

In a nutshell, Blacknight (where its hosted) don't peer with Smart at INEX so it has to go through COLT's network to make it there and back if any of those pipes are full its going to affect your results. Best times for testing are quite late into the evening 11pm ish onwards to up to about 6-7am.

If you want to get the full speeds take some big ass file from HEAnet's FTP/HTTP server and look at the speed, it should be a fairly accurate representation of your line speed as HEAnet peer with Smart and so do Esat so it explains why your are getting good speeds off their FTP.

Blub2k4

ok cheers, must look into peering agreements.

Vunderground

What happens if Garfield doesn't come back?

dub45

Vunderground wrote:

What happens if Garfield doesn't come back?

His bank manager will be very worried!

TimTim

Blub2k4 wrote:

ok cheers, must look into peering agreements.

Have a look here it should tell you all you need to know.

fatmander

kin9pin wrote:

Sounds rather expensive to me, even with free line rental.

No free line rental.
Static IP, 40Gb D/L cap and 24 to 1 contention
no, definately not cheap
no ntl here either
smart comin though