Eircom ADSL pricing.

Mountjoy Mugger

Originally posted by dahamsta
The information coming out of Esat is very conflicting. One person has told me (via another) that Esat's pricing will be very competitive. Another has told me (again via another) that it's not prudent to wait, as Esat are in no hurry to release a service. Course, they're not /really/ conflicting...

It would be very interesting to see if Eircom react to a competitive pricing from Esat.

[dream mode] Esat launch unlimited 512/128 for €80, inclusive of VAT[/dream mode]

Pimp

does it actually cost eircom money when people d/l? or is this purely a money making thing?

and another thing. Is there a minimum term of contract eg 6months/1 year?

manonthemoon

Does anyone lnow would the Adsl be suitable for a small internet cafe.

Say 10 PC's

Would customers have a fast enough connection for gaming

koneko

Minimum contract is 12 months. If you cancel out, I believe they can charge you up to a few months of the cost.

dahamsta

does it actually cost eircom money when people d/l?

Kind of. In a way. Not really. Uh...

See, connectivity is bought in bulk, for fixed fees; and you don't buy transfer, you buy bandwidth. Plumbing is the best way of explaining it: Say Beecher H2O[TM] supplies you with water, and I have a pipe going into your gaff (so to speak). But I have an innovative (and rather devious) business model: I charge you for the /pipe/, not the water. When you pay me a fixed fee for the pipe, I turn on your water, and you can pull as much water as you damn well please though it; I won't charge you a red cent for the actual water.

But you can only get a certain amount of water through the pipe, right? So if you want more water, you have to buy another pipe. Ha! Gotacha, sucker! To bring this across to backhaul: If Eircom have a 155Mbps link to New York, they pay a fixed fee for it. If they fill the link, they have to get another one, again for a fixed fee.

Industry seems to find this perfectly acceptable, which I've always found rather odd. It strikes me as one of the biggest, longest-running and most widely-accepted scams in history. No-one has ever explained why bandwidth is billed in this way. Perhaps someone could explain it to me today?

or is this purely a money making thing?

Kind of. In a way. Not really. Uh...

I can't answer this definitively*, but I reckon that it's aimed primarily at stopping "abuse" right from the off. Of course, many (including myself) wouldn't define using more than 3GB of transfer a month as abusive -- BT's soon-to-be-released "BT Broadband" product's cap one 1GB a /day/ demonstrates this admirably. (Transparency: the cap hasn't been confirmed by BT yet.)

Eircom may not be able to match BT on this, because they don't have BT's bandwidth buying power and so pay higher prices, but it couldn't be /that/ far off. And again, this is arguable, because we don't know BT's margin on the product, and we don't know usage averages. It's quite likely that usage averages are far below their stated cap.

Is there a minimum term of contract eg 6months/1 year?

Yes: From the oft-quoted Pending Changes document: "An eircom i-stream access is subject to a minimum contract period of twelve months. Where an eircom i-stream access is ceased during the minimum twelve month contract period the customer is liable to pay the monthly rental for the balance of the unexpired contract period up to a maximum of six months' rental."

adam


* Because, obviously, I don't work at Eircom**.
** Hey Eircom, how about giving me a job? I'm that desperate! I'll even start spelling your name with a lowercase 'E'?!

BKtje

Originally posted by Pimp
Just ordered the single user....i dont d/l all that much, i use the net for gaming. Note: My line failed the line test for the trials but has now mysteriuosly passed for the actual product.

OMG i can smell the low/stable ping.
Anyone who online games knows what i am talking about

Pimp

Apparently the 'ping' is a disgrace. If your on ISDN it will get worse than what you already have but i suppose if your on 56k it will seem like a dream. If you think your ping will be anywhere near what the ppl with DSL in UK or NL ping your mistaken. (according to the ppl on the trial who replied to my queries. Its in a thread here somewhere)

The game itself will dload/upload quite a lot when u play. I can upload/dload about 30 megs or more for a cpl hours gaming and thats on ISDN. On dsl ud be looking at breaking the 3 gig limit with just ur gaming if you aint careful.

BK

TinCool

Okay, whats the Eircom ADSL info line phone number ?

Saruman

If people boycott ADSL until they bring down their prices would they do it you think?

dahamsta

If people boycott ADSL until they bring down their prices would they do it you think?

Of course they would, they've invested a rake of money in it, they have to start getting a return on it. But how many people are really going to "boycott" it? If I was near an ADSL-enabled exchange, I'd already have signed up, because ADSL would both save me money and provide better connectivity. It would be a /necessity/ for me, not a luxury. The same goes for most SME's and sole traders.

Competition will deal with pricing. If competition doesn't, the ODTR will have to sort it out, but it's not time yet. The market has to be given a chance in this case.

adam

Winters

I would like to use it but at thoese prices :rolleyes: .
I think most people will now wait and see what ESAt and everybody else has to offer. If they price it cheap EVERYONE will go with them.

Dustaz

Originally posted by B-K-DzR


Apparently the 'ping' is a disgrace.

The ping isnt that bad. With a bit of tweaking i get 50 on irish servers.

The game itself will dload/upload quite a lot when u play. I can upload/dload about 30 megs or more for a cpl hours gaming and thats on ISDN. On dsl ud be looking at breaking the 3 gig limit with just ur gaming if you aint careful.

Rubbish. Ive had it since august and ive been gaming a HELL of a lot. Ive only run over the cap once and that was when i went absolutly mental on kazaa. Let me make this perfectly clear again. If you only use it for gaming and things like IRC, youll be allright with the cap.

longword

Originally posted by Dustaz

The ping isnt that bad. With a bit of tweaking i get 50 on irish servers.

Did anyone ask them to turn off interleave?

Dustaz

ill speak for more than myself when i say "huh?"

Whos them and whats interleave?
(eircom and an exchange setting?)

longword

Originally posted by Dustaz
ill speak for more than myself when i say "huh?"

I have a feeling that'll be the response I get from Eircom when I ask

Whos them and whats interleave?
(eircom and an exchange setting?)

DSL can operate in two modes, "Interleave" or "FastPath" (AKA "Fast" or "Interleave off"). It's an exchange setting. As I understand it, inteleave mode introduces deliberate delays and Forward Error Correction into the data to spread out the transmission a bit on the line and make it less succeptible to interferance. It's the same trick they use on compact discs, allowing them to survive a certain level of damage with no impact on the audio quality.

FastPath allows for lower pings - less than 20ms on the first hop of a traceroute - but might lead to more packet loss or even an unreliable service depending on the quality of the line.

Best link I can come up with is: http://www.gaoresearch.com/news/media/tol/TOLReview2.html

Dangger

The DSL source book from Paradyene is a good futher intro to DSL technology. Its freely available at http://www.paradyne.com/sourcebook_offer/

The DSL Sourcebook - Third Edition
The Comprehensive Resource On Digital Subscriber Line Technology - This edition has been completely revised from cover to cover, featuring dozens of new and updated network diagrams, plus an introduction to Service Level Management for DSL providers.

jmcc

Originally posted by dahamsta

Industry seems to find this perfectly acceptable, which I've always found rather odd. It strikes me as one of the biggest, longest-running and most widely-accepted scams in history. No-one has ever explained why bandwidth is billed in this way.

The ISPs and providers buyers buy bandwidth. The ISPs then resell the bandwidth. Of course they do not want to resell clean bandwidth to the public - that would be just wasting the investment as more often than not the link would be just ticking over rather than being actively used to saturation point.

So instead of selling pure dedicated bandwidth to a single non-leased line customer, the ISPs break it down so that they can sell the same bandwidth to a whole pile of customers. None of these customers are guaranteed any bandwith (most ADSL and DSL agreements would not guarantee that the customer will get rates of X kbit/s up and Y kbit/s down but rather that these are maximum rates that the user will get under optimum conditions.). This is the concept of contention - customers effectively contending for bandwidth. I don't know what contention ratios that Eircom and Esat are using for ADSL but I can guess that the domestic users will get shafted in favour of the business users. Leased line users tend to pay more for their bandwidth.

Packet based networks (the old Eirpac network if anyone remembers it.) used to be billed on packets sent rather than the bandwidth. However with the widespread use of the internet, there is the problem of valuing the packet.

ISPs used to run on users:modems ratios of as bad as 10:1 in the early days. The principal was that no users would be connected continually thus tying up a modem.

One thing that worries me about Eircom is that it would probably try to bill ADSL users for DoS attacks. I doubt that they are using a sophisticated billing model that breaks down traffic types.

As regards the bandwidth selling model being a scam - it is to an extent but it is not as bad as Eircom shares.

Regards...jmcc

BKtje

Rubbish. Ive had it since august and ive been gaming a HELL of a lot. Ive only run over the cap once and that was when i went absolutly mental on kazaa. Let me make this perfectly clear again. If you only use it for gaming and things like IRC, youll be allright with the cap. [/B]

Well i been keeping a record of what i dload/upload a day for the last month and with my gaming habits im doing about 30megs down for gaming alone on an average day. That works out about 1.2gigs ish.
(i realise after re-working my sums that i made a small error which dbl'd the size ). Still 1.2gigs on gaming in a month is a lot . But your right well within limits as logn as you dont go crazy on kazaa.

One thing i am wondering tho. your 50ms to irish servers. I take it thats a game ping and not a dos ping? If so what game plz?
I read on here that the eircom dsl gave dodgy pings (slightly higher than isdn). Ne chance of clearing this up for me cos if what u say is accurate then im much more inclined towards DSL.

Cheers

longword

Originally posted by Dangger
The DSL source book from Paradyene is a good futher intro to DSL technology.

An excellent read. Thanks for the link.

ando

Originally posted by B-K-DzR
I read on here that the eircom dsl gave dodgy pings (slightly higher than isdn

SLIGHTLY !! I once got a ping of 23 to barrysworld (england) with isdn (64k) but for some reason I usually get late 40's now

El_MUERkO

I'd sign up immediately if the cap was 15gigs or more. So I'll cross my fingers and see what ESAT have to offer.

//hurry up ESAT me is stomping my feet

TinCool

I'd really appreciate it if someone could tell me the ADSL Eircom Telephone Number ? I can't find it anywhere on their site and I hadn't a pen handy when I heard the ad on the radio yesterday morning.

pete

1800 512 128

but they'll just take your name and address

you can fill in the expression of interest form on their site and do the same thing

Winters

Wait for the launch to get more information. They seem to be limited on what they can offer. You ring one night and thay say something then the next night they say the oppisite.

Yoda

Looking at these prices and the restrictions imposed, I can say only that my small business can't even consider this "offer" from Éircom. It isn't reasonably priced.

Winters

I agree. The prices are expensive for a lot of small business. They seem to only want BIG business to get ADSL.

BKtje

i dont totally agree, it will depend on the nature of the small business. My fathers small business uses the internet a fair bit, (dloading files etc) and use ISDN. They plan to get dsl as it will work out cheaper in the long run.

Tho it will depend on what kinda small business as was said.

butch9850

i have had PSDN at 50k for a few weeks now,i switched to esat for the calls
generally no problems,,but eircoms charged this massive reconnection fee..and since we switched the line on during the week(a 13 euro fee)..
ok surfing is cheap enough for me at night time,weekends,
looking at even hi speed with eircom rigth now is too dear really with installations etc..
i think the only option i hope for is to wait on my PSDN line and get a flat rate soemtime in the distant future
they are ripping us off when you consider 24/7 surfing time yap