Who's using ISDN?

Pharaoh

Just curious to know how many people using
these boards are on ISDN,and what they think of it so far.
1. Has anyone been tempted to give it back?
2. What was the amount of your last phone bill?

m1ke

ISDN is really all you can get at the moment that's anyway half way near decent. It's ****ing priced off this earth too ... but can give excellent results.

Pings : mostly 50 pings to Ire+UK ... good gaming preformance ... well enuff to smash anything 56k can do... and enuff to make gaming competitive and fun.

Download speeds : pretty shyte tbh... 7.5k/sec ain't that amazing ... it's cool on 128k tho you can get upto 16k/sec but then again price comes into it.

It's all price really if u wanna use 128k and dial expensive isps to play games ... my last bill was about £100 for the month. Pretty pricey considering esat is only £20 on 56k and the line rental is £35/month.

Cake Fiend

It's grand if you have gullible parents to foot the bill.

Pharaoh

I actually do have ISDN myself I was just wondering who on the boards was using it
as well and were they happy with it.

Hey Quorthon! I finally got that TA sorted
I bought a new one and it works perfectly

Gerry

I have isdn, and no real complaints about it. Disconnections are always the fault of the isp, and rarely happen. There have been outages, but eircom have always been helpful and quick to fix it. Its very fast, under ideal conditions, e.g. quakeworld on vishnu.ign.ie, I get 33-45 ping, never over 50. I can't tell the difference between it and lan. Quake3 is more of a mixed bag, duels are grand, but tdm can have high pings sometimes, even on the irish server. I think its quake3's bad netcode more than anything else.

As for downloading, I find isdn quite fast for downloading, its way better than a modem. From any decent server, I get 7-8k , every time.

My bills started at about £130 for 2 months, managed to reduce this a bit.

sutty

I have it, Getting it installed was a pain in the ass, For games/ d/l its grand.


lets not talk about the last bill...........

---

Ciaran Sutcliffe
aka: sutty
[HIV]sutty
For a good time goto:
http://www.hotinternetvirgins.com

gandalf

Yep great for gaming especially all the UK, Dutch, Swedish & German Tactical Ops servers. Download speeds are normally good. But the cost !!!! Gerry how the hell do you keep your bill down to £130 for 2 months.

Gandalf.

Canaboid

Simple, stay off peak.
44p an hour - 3 hrs a day - 60days(2months) = £80. It's not that fuggin' expensive.

Pharaoh

OK...How does this sound to some of you guys
Last bill was £236.08.
That includes about 90hrs online time (roughly).I'm using the eircom subscription account @0.8p off peak.

bugler

I'd love to get it,but the cost is just too much.The rental included,I mean come on.what is the rental charge? £35 a month? Any news on Esat offering no-limits for ISDN?or has that been fuxx0red by the recent troubles with regular No-limits?
Until some form of package deal comes in there is no way I can get it.

[This message has been edited by bugler (edited 16-04-2001).]

smoke.me.a.kipper

i get about the same d/l speed 7k a sec. but we have a lan @ home (3 comps) and it can take 2 of them on cs to netshop with pings rarely over 140 for either comp. and for surfing the net, it's grand.

the price is the only thing bollóxing it all up at the moment. i only ever tried it out on 128k once, and don't use that due to costs. still, it being a second line, keeps the the other people in the house happy.

---

- Ciaranj - ciaranj.com

This post has been brought to you by the letter C, and the number 7.

Gerry

precisely, stay off peak I can use the internet during the day in college.

Quorthon

Pretty much the same results as Mike above. Excellent gaming performance, and for anything else, while its expensive, it really is the best available for Irish people (the majority anyway) at the moment.

hehe when I got it installed Last June, people were laughing at me, saying that cable/dsl/genesis was just around the corner, but I could see the writing on the wall even then.

Q

Koopa

same as m1ke and gerry, isdn is nearly perfect for quake1/counterstrike, quake3 isnt so good on isdn but thats because it requires more bandwidth than 64k, its still playable enough unless youre playing against cable modemers or adsl people..

internet bill is around £100 for every 2 months, not including rental or normal phonecalls

Hoojah Nickabolokov

howaya

The ONLY extra cost involved in ISDN over your 56k setup is the installation! Rental is still 35 nicker a month & don't have to use both lines(128k) when you connect. but it makes sense to use both for downloading files - it may cost you twice as much but you're getting it twice as quick - so it doesn't cost twice as much!

So if you're an impatient b stard like me then get ISDN, you'll be old before anything better comes along.

Oh and as consolation to everyone else my last bill was a filthy £370. 'bout £300 of that for d'ol ISDN. doh!

cheers

---

h nickabolokov

Canaboid

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Hoojah Nickabolokov:

The ONLY extra cost involved in ISDN over your 56k setup is the installation! Rental is still 35 nicker a month
</font>

No. Rental is only £30 bimonthly for a ordinary analogue line. ISDN is double the rental.

Pharaoh

According to my last bill........

Recurring Charges
Additional number is for...01 ******* 1@ 0.00
Hi-speed main number for..01 ******* 1@£58.00
Equipment...........7 £3.82
Detail bill charge... £3.00
Total Recurring charges...........£64.82

Chowmein

I gots it to

Cake Fiend

PSTN line rental is £14.25 monthly from eircom. ISDN line rental is £34.80, so not that much more than 2 analogue lines. Installation is the same for either (£98.18).
Call charges for ISDN are the same as for PSTN, the only difference gamers would care about is the fact that ISDN rarely works with esat SNL, so you'll always be paying for the call. AFAIK there are no flat-rate ISDN ISPs at the moment.

po0k

In holland u get 20kb/sec on one channell. I heard it from a fellah who knows his stuff, and checked with a lad I know from Holland.
Somwtimes u get up to 30kilobytes/sec
I don't know how, maybe some nifty compression or something, or they get more then 64kbps in one channel. The dude I heard it from also has ISDN, here in Galway and gets 7-8kilobytes a sec.
Their tlecoms infrastructure is class, our domestic is litle more then two tin-cans a pices of old string. My god but thats depressing........

Kali

20 or 30kilobytes/sec on one channel?
thats like 160kbps and 240kbps..
therefore thats not ISDN.
ISDN (at least BRI) is 144kpbs .. 2x64kpbs data channels + a 16kpbs switching channel.
They may have a better telecom infrastructure but thats not going to increase ISDN speeds.

At a rough guess he's downloading vast amounts of blank text files to increase his ego size.

bugler

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Sico:
PSTN line rental is £14.25 monthly from eircom. ISDN line rental is £34.80, so not that much more than 2 analogue lines. </font>

No......not true!

Celt

Syxpak, afaik isdn modems like 56k modems have a max d.l rate. 512k cable can get you optimally ~60k a sec
30k a sec = half 512k cable = 256k isdn?

Cake Fiend

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by bugler:

No......not true!

</font>

Really? Go to www.eircom.ie then.

bugler

Well according to my bill:
The rental on an extra line is £21.84 for 2 months.This means i'm being charged £10.92 per month for an analogue line.Its a little bit higher than what i thought.Note:I incorrectly stated above that it was a tenner for two months,mistake obviously.
Now that was straight from the last bill,and the rental was charged up to the end of this month.I didn't go to the website Sico.Basically because I care more about what the actual bill says rather than what their website says.Also,it was taking too long to load(damn analogue lines!).I haven't been informed of any price hike in the offing by eircom afaik,so i hope the rental isnt about to be bumped up.I'm not sure how much your being charged Sico(are you on ISDN?)but if its more than me for 2 lines then maybe you need to get on to eircom and ask why your brethren in Clare are getting cheaper rental.
The breakdown is now thus:ISDN rental: £35 monthly.
2 analogue lines rental:£21.84 monthly.

In response to your question Gerry,my previous posts have all related to the costs of analogue lines.So maybe a more appropriate question would be:
If you don't have two analogue lines then why are you insisting you know more about it than the people who do?
OR
Why aren't you reading my posts?

My initial answer when I first saw it was because I'm an egotistical w*nker who thinks he knows everything,obviously.

elexes

well ive had my isdn since ..... i think its been since it was offered in my area . dont use the 128 cause of price connection to q3 servers in uk pings are usualy between 50-130 mostly staying to 50 . dl speeds are a steady 8k . and my last phoen bill was 140 pounds of calls to oceanfree.net

Gerry

Here bugler, if you don't have isdn, why are you insisting that you know more about the charges than people who do have it?

po0k

I don't mean the actual data going thru=ough his TA is 20-30k, I mean his overall through put.........I know.
64kbps, divide by 8 to get kilobytes ( apparently)
should equal 8kB at most right?
STAC compression can get the actual useable throughput up a fair bt higher. Also the 30KB was only on rare occasions, like at 4am etc....

vicadd

I've ordered Hi-speed from Eircom and from a quick browse of these boards, it sounds like their modem is not worth the £50 they are asking - does anyone have a recommendation of what to get and if there is anywhere in Ireland doing a good deal ?
Thanks.

bugler

Answer here maybe:
http://www.boards.ie/bulletin/Forum3/HTML/000892.html

bugler

I might be looking at ISDN myself now.
No limits has been unusable basically for anything but mIRC for this week.Should this continue,then theres no point going on with it.Should that happen then the only extra recurring charges I'll have would be the £15 or so rental in comparison with my 2 lines.
Hmmmmmm.Need to scrape the cash for installation and TA though.