North West Electronics/BlueBox

chris_ie · 06-11-2014 9:50pm

Thats pretty high! I've emailed them a few times but no reply.

fooker! · 06-11-2014 10:01pm

I've been emailing them the past few days about it but they just tried to fob me off by saying I should take the next generation package they have, when I asked them yesterday if they were trying to say that this would fix it they said...
"If you wish to have your equipment changed out to the Next Generation product then you will have the pleasure of experiencing some of, if not the fastest broadband speeds available anywhere in Ireland at the moment."

I emailed comreg for advice on Monday and they told me that if I didn't get resolution that they will contact them!
Ill see how it goes , ill try anything at this stage!

excollier · 06-11-2014 10:08pm

I have next-gen, still slow in the evening.

chris_ie · 06-11-2014 10:12pm

Yeah next gen here too.

fooker! · 06-11-2014 10:58pm

pings up and down but packet loss is now at 12-14%

chris_ie · 06-11-2014 11:02pm

fooker! wrote: »

pings up and down but packet loss is now at 12-14%

Yeah mine hasnt got any better. I had stopped my pings for a while must start them up again. Pretty poor that they dont seem to have an out of hours person. They should be getting alerts on these issues anyways.

pawddy · 10-11-2014 8:39pm

Sorry, I haven't been checking this thread recently because I've just given up. First emailed them about this problem at the start of January and it still isn't fixed, bit ridiculous isn't it? Just done three pingtests, with 8%, 10%, 13% packet loss. Ping around 150ms, and jitter around 100ms. I'm not sure about you but I think that's shocking. I can't watch anything on YouTube or Netflix, nor have I been able to play any sort of online game for the past year. Their customer service is the worst I've come across. I don't see a point in sending emails anymore because NWE decide to ignore them. Haven't a clue what's going on, but I cannot wait to get rid of this crap.

pawddy · 10-11-2014 8:41pm

Won't let me edit my above post to add this in, but the last time they came around to my house, they told me that I am the only person reporting these problems. Clearly not. What a shambles!

chris_ie · 10-11-2014 9:11pm

100ms is bad. Where are you pinging to? The address they told me to ping was 78.155.224.3. I was getting 5% loss and complained. They said he changed something and asked me to do a speed test (even though I didn't complain about speed). Since Friday or so now every evening from about 5 until around midnight I am getting a lot of loss around 10% and speeds around 3mb.

Haven't heard from them since last week. Every response seems straight out of a customer service document. "Please be advised" etc

pawddy · 11-11-2014 7:06pm

I've just been using pingtest.net. I also got a lot of 'Can you send us a speedtest?'. Annoying to say the least.

chris_ie · 11-11-2014 8:32pm

Ah right. You should try the following from command promp.

ping 8.8.8.8 -n 100

That will ping googles dns (usually reliable) 100 times and at the end should give you a summary or loss, average time etc. You could aslo try to the address I mentioned on here previously.

pawddy · 11-11-2014 9:31pm

Okay. To Google's DNS servers, I got an average of 35ms, and 12% packet loss.

To 78.155.224.3, I got an average of 8ms, and 14% packet loss.

Doesn't look good.

chris_ie · 11-11-2014 9:36pm

Yeah I'm getting quite a bit of loss aswell, around 10-15% between 5PM and midnight.

Tommy Lagahan · 11-11-2014 10:15pm

Same here lads. Speeds are semi acceptable (3-6Mb) at this time of night but the packet loss sure isn't.
Packet loss is actually far worse if you check with a CoD4 server and the lagometer, it shows a dropped packet at least once a second and sometimes several.

chris_ie · 11-11-2014 10:30pm

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Same here lads. Speeds are semi acceptable (3-6Mb) at this time of night but the packet loss sure isn't.
Packet loss is actually far worse if you check with a CoD4 server and the lagometer, it shows a dropped packet at least once a second and sometimes several.

I used to be able to get around 10-15mb during peak times. Now its less since last week. Packet loss is terrible. No confidence in them fixing it at the minute..

pawddy · 11-11-2014 10:40pm

Meh. My connections been like this for the past year now. Come 5pm and you have high ping, high jitter, and high packet loss. I've lost all faith in them to be honest. I'm with you Chris. They couldn't fix it when I first complained around January, so I don't think they'll be able to fix it any time soon.

Tommy Lagahan · 11-11-2014 10:55pm

pawddy wrote: »

Meh. My connections been like this for the past year now. Come 5pm and you have high ping, high jitter, and high packet loss. I've lost all faith in them to be honest. I'm with you Chris. They couldn't fix it when I first complained around January, so I don't think they'll be able to fix it any time soon.

Its probably some kind of load balancing / traffic shaping / QoS system they have going on utterly dieing trying to manage so much traffic at once.

chris_ie · 12-11-2014 9:59am

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Its probably some kind of load balancing / traffic shaping / QoS system they have going on utterly dieing trying to manage so much traffic at once.

Yeah thats what I had thought also. I was told at one point that they didnt do any traffic shaping at all. I ran a few tests online that check for this which seemed to confirm this, but as you say it could be load balancing or the like. Interested to see what my update will be today...

pawddy · 13-11-2014 8:44pm

I was just thinking.. has anyone ever heard from this senior engineer they speak of?

Tommy Lagahan · 13-11-2014 8:57pm

Nope. Never got more than "its on our end, we're fixing it" every single time.

pawddy · 13-11-2014 9:20pm

You're lucky. All I get is 'We'll pass this information on to our senior engineer...'. I'm starting to question his existence.

wandererz · 14-11-2014 3:47am

He moved on earlier this year to join the British Antarctic Survey.

...seriously.

chris_ie · 14-11-2014 4:27pm

wandererz wrote: »

He moved on earlier this year to join the British Antarctic Survey.

...seriously.

Haha, that is true. I know the guy you are on about. He was great at the job. If I had an issue and was chatting to him he would have it sorted. No such luck now. As others have said its this mysterious senior engineer now. I was told I'd have an update earlier in the week but got nothing.

thebo · 14-11-2014 7:42pm

does NWE have any download limits?

pawddy · 14-11-2014 7:48pm

thebo wrote: »

does NWE have any download limits?

They don't, but if your thinking about switching to NWE, I wouldn't recommend it.

gooner99 · 14-11-2014 11:38pm

I believe the service in west Donegal is still good. My brother has is a few months and is happy with it.

Tommy Lagahan · 15-11-2014 12:49am

Outside Donegal town here myself, in Barnesmore gap area. 2KM from mast, line of sight but ya still get 20% packet loss and 2Mb at peak times. Don't choose NWE unless its a last resort.
An update on the packet loss anyway, used to go away around 11 but tonight its a steady 5% leaving it utterly useless to me trying to game.

gooner99 · 15-11-2014 1:11am

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Outside Donegal town here myself, in Barnesmore gap area. 2KM from mast, line of sight but ya still get 20% packet loss and 2Mb at peak times. Don't choose NWE unless its a last resort.
An update on the packet loss anyway, used to go away around 11 but tonight its a steady 5% leaving it utterly useless to me trying to game.

I'll get me brother in Gweedore to check his for me. For speed test and packet loss what apps do we use?

Tommy Lagahan · 15-11-2014 1:21am

gooner99 wrote: »

I'll get me brother in Gweedore to check his for me. For speed test and packet loss what apps do we use?

I usually use Speedtest.net with the Vodaphone Dublin server, it was the fastest when I was on eFibre living at college. (Damn I miss efibre)
The 5% packet loss I'm referring to tonight was picked up in Counter Strike GO's net_graph, but a "ping www.google.ie -n 100" command in command prompt will give ya a fair idea.

gooner99 · 15-11-2014 10:39am

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

I usually use Speedtest.net with the Vodaphone Dublin server, it was the fastest when I was on eFibre living at college. (Damn I miss efibre)
The 5% packet loss I'm referring to tonight was picked up in Counter Strike GO's net_graph, but a "ping www.google.ie -n 100" command in command prompt will give ya a fair idea.

Just did that command line prompt on my own laptop on standard DSL, is it the TTL fiqure that we're interested in?

Scrub that I see it gives the total packet loss when it finishes.0% for me.Will ask him to check.

chris_ie · 15-11-2014 3:34pm

I had a few games last night and got disconnected once and other games were quite poor. Was told 'minor changes' were made to my connection but still the same. It just seems to be that their connection out to th web is struggling at peak times.

When doing a ping to somewhere like Google the loss can happen outside the NWE network which they can't control. They should however be able to raise and issue with their link or whatever.

When pinging their own node if there is loss then that is in their control. If you do a traceroute it shows the full route to the node and you can see if certain nodes are giving loss.

chris_ie · 15-11-2014 11:11pm

Getting 3MB tonight, my phone on the 3 network is getting 4MB......

fooker! · 16-11-2014 2:12am

Stayed up thinking I might get a reasonable game of cod, getting good download and up, 3.88MB and .88mb.
ping is around 400, jitter 300, it drops down for a few seconds but goes back up, packet loss is around 3-4% so I guess not tonight!

pawddy · 16-11-2014 5:07pm

It's just turned 4pm and my connection is already getting worse. 2.7Mbps down, and 1Mbps up. Around 3% packet loss too..

pawddy · 16-11-2014 9:43pm

Won't let me update my previous post. Currently experiencing 15-20% packet loss. That's the worst I've ever gotten!

chris_ie · 17-11-2014 2:05pm

Had the same myself. Engineer supposedly looking at my connection today again. To be honest I dont think its my connection, individually, it seems to be their entire network. Fair enough ICMP (Ping) packets can get dropped during peak times as they are not as high a priority as normal traffic, but that usually points to a capacity issue. They just cant handle the traffic. I'm hoping its just a poorly configured router somewhere and not that they are overloading the network.

I'm going to keep pushing them anyways to fix it, mail everyday or so until its done. Hopefully others are doing the same!

pawddy · 17-11-2014 8:36pm

chris_ie wrote: »

Had the same myself. Engineer supposedly looking at my connection today again. To be honest I dont think its my connection, individually, it seems to be their entire network. Fair enough ICMP (Ping) packets can get dropped during peak times as they are not as high a priority as normal traffic, but that usually points to a capacity issue. They just cant handle the traffic. I'm hoping its just a poorly configured router somewhere and not that they are overloading the network.

I'm going to keep pushing them anyways to fix it, mail everyday or so until its done. Hopefully others are doing the same!

I actually had an engineer out a few months ago, and he basically said that whatever transmitter I was connected to was overloaded, and that there wasn't anything he could do. I'm assuming that's still the problem at the minute.

chris_ie · 17-11-2014 11:04pm

Poor form overloading. Would mean their contention rate would be rubbish as well. Hate when that is used to explain poor performance. I've done tests in the very early hours of the morning and my connection maxes out at 25mb. At one point when I knew a guy working there I hit 35mb or so. So it is possible, it's not a limitation of the infrastructure. So I don't think 50mb at 48:1 is accurate. But of course all ISP love the term "up to" in order to cover themselves.

pawddy · 18-11-2014 8:04pm

Anyone else's internet been down for most of the day? Mines has been off since 11AM and just came back online at 7PM.

chris_ie · 18-11-2014 8:10pm

pawddy wrote: »

Anyone else's internet been down for most of the day? Mines has been off since 11AM and just came back online at 7PM.

Mine hasn't gone down today I don't think. I did have an outage of an hour and a half yesterday which I was told was dealt with in a timely manner!

Man I hate comin across as such a moaner but it's a pain in the a**....

fooker! · 18-11-2014 10:10pm

pawddy wrote: »

Anyone else's internet been down for most of the day? Mines has been off since 11AM and just came back online at 7PM.

Yep mine was off yesterday for a few hours and today when I got home at 5 for half an hour or so, after it came back on it was getting crazy high pings and jitter for an hour or so after, highest was 1620-ping 1988-jitter. it never went below 1000 for over an hour!

Its back to "normal" now, high packet loss but around 300-500 ping and jitter now.

Tommy Lagahan · 19-11-2014 10:34am

chris_ie wrote: »

When doing a ping to somewhere like Google the loss can happen outside the NWE network which they can't control. They should however be able to raise and issue with their link or whatever.

When pinging their own node if there is loss then that is in their control. If you do a traceroute it shows the full route to the node and you can see if certain nodes are giving loss.

Good idea, will ping that from now on.

Tommy Lagahan · 22-11-2014 12:09pm

Got around to checking the ping internally (within NWE) as well as externally there. TraceRT brought up 12 hops around their internal network between the signal receiver and my external IP. I took the cust-xxx-xxx.nwewn.com IP (my external one) as the IP to ping at the edge of NWE's network and google.ie for external.

http://i.imgur.com/8yPq1Bs.png

Turns out internal suffers from packet loss and ping jitter too. Will check again later at peak times, though CS:GO is already unplayable atm with packet loss and ping jitter. Back to the Three stick yaaaay..............:(

pawddy · 23-11-2014 1:23pm

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Got around to checking the ping internally (within NWE) as well as externally there. TraceRT brought up 12 hops around their internal network between the signal receiver and my external IP. I took the cust-xxx-xxx.nwewn.com IP (my external one) as the IP to ping at the edge of NWE's network and google.ie for external.

Turns out internal suffers from packet loss and ping jitter too. Will check again later at peak times, though CS:GO is already unplayable atm with packet loss and ping jitter. Back to the Three stick yaaaay..............:(

Are you only getting 1-2% packet loss? You're lucky! I usually play CS in the mornings to try and take advantage of the lower pings and lowish packet loss.. This morning between 11:30 and 12:15 I was playing with around 90-150ms ping, and between 1-6% packet loss. I used to be able to play with 40-60ms ping and 0% packet loss! Those were the days!

Tommy Lagahan · 23-11-2014 7:04pm

pawddy wrote: »

Are you only getting 1-2% packet loss? You're lucky! I usually play CS in the mornings to try and take advantage of the lower pings and lowish packet loss.. This morning between 11:30 and 12:15 I was playing with around 90-150ms ping, and between 1-6% packet loss. I used to be able to play with 40-60ms ping and 0% packet loss! Those were the days!

Jaysus I won't go near CS unless I've got 1% or 0% packet loss and pings under 90, you're far more patient than myself. Packet loss usually hits 25-30% from 7/8PM to 11/12 at night. I'm mostly gaming on the ould 3 shtick these days, which suffers ping spikes instead of packet loss SMH. Either way cant game at peak hours.

chris_ie · 25-11-2014 4:54pm

Seen some more updates on governments broadband plans : http://www.broadband.gov.ie/

I'm hoping that the solution to our areas isnt NWE and we actually get an alternative.... If they add more to their network its going to get worse.

ShowMeTheCash · 27-11-2014 2:43pm

I have had blue box now for a few years in the Glenagivney area up near Moville Greencastle Gleneely direction.

I am nearly sure the contention ratio promised was 10:1 but lately it is getting worse so I have to conclude they are simply putting more and more people on without adding hardwear.
I would be interested to know what hardwear they are using and how they have balanced their netword infrastructure.

My worry is if location A people are complaning of speeds they load balance to location B servers (If they can do that). People in location A are happy, people from location B complain then they re-balance again and again.

I too have got the "This has been passed to our network specialist" e-mail.

Not that they will give me the information but I would like to know, how many users do they have to each switch? How many servers do they have and capacity of the NIC? 1Gig tunnel 10Gig tunnel?

If the ratio is 48:1 you can gurantee that is on average assuming no more than half are online at the same time so you probably have twice that on the same switch.

Just a quick look at what might be happening
96 per 50Mb, 1024 / 50 call it 20... 20 * 96 = 1920 users per 1Gig Nic

Users on at the same time and download speeds might be something like this:

1920 would get .5 Mg
960 would get 1 Mg
480 would get 2 Mg
240 would get 4 Mg
120 would get 8 Mg
60 would get 16 Mg
etc...

NIMAN · 28-11-2014 12:29pm

Was chatting to a family member the other day who has been a customer of theirs for a couple of years, and he's heading back to VF, said he is fed up with incredibly low speeds and constantly dropping signal.

excollier · 28-11-2014 12:44pm

My service is quick enough for me during the day, but at night....other than light web browsing, it's pitiful. I hope I live long enough to see fibre rolled out here.

ShowMeTheCash · 28-11-2014 12:54pm

excollier wrote: »

My service is quick enough for me during the day, but at night....other than light web browsing, it's pitiful. I hope I live long enough to see fibre rolled out here.

In fairness it is not the technology, fiber or fixed wireless the same issue can arise.
NWE are a small outfit that by the looks of it are not scaling well with increased numbers.

If you have 100 users with fiber all contected to the same hub and 100 Fixed wireless users connected to a similar hub they will be the same.

Each hub will only be able to handle a certain amount of users before you need a second hub etc....
You overload the hub then the their is only so much capacity it can handle. This is why it is fine during the day when most people are at work and kids are at school, then come 5 o'clock youtube and netflix are in full swing it begins to slow up...

North West Electronics/BlueBox

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