North West Electronics/BlueBox

A friend of mine got NWE in the time I got National Broadband Scheme 3g in, in the same area. Back then NWE's prices were extortionate so my parents couldn't afford it. Apart from an outage for a week which was promptly sorted (3g went down for 3 weeks without a peep from three at the same time), his speeds regularly sat around 3mb down and 1mb up even at peak times, over the last 4 years. They upgraded to higher speeds at some time last year too, apparently with quite a noticeable jump in speed. I'll know for myself soon enough, put in an order in November but they're backlogged something fierce so it will be March when they get to my installation. Fingers crossed, Three is now completely dead in the area.

I still haven't heard from them, if I get no word by the end of this month I might take a trip up to their sales office in Derry to see whats going on. Need this broadband at home since Three has such high contention now its more or less dead most of the day.
Between that and the fact that they're officially supplying last mile broadband in the north I can understand the backlog.
If I get any word from them between now and then I'll post back here.

Hi Tommy,

Just to let you know that Bluebox called me on Saturday and arranged for an engineer visit yesterday (Monday). Unfortunately our power was out all day yesterday due to damaged power lines or something on our street, so Iain the engineer couldn't get set up on the day. Iain was dead on and was explaining how much demand there is for their services, leading to higher waiting times, just like you had said. They'll be back in my area again on the 29th so fingers crossed I'll get up and going then.

It has been roughly 5 and half months since I submitted my application.

Hopefully you'll get sorted a bit sooner.

Thanks Tommy,
Richie.

Well Richie, got it installed there, technician was dead on, speeds at the moment are fantastic!
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2576430120.png
This is some jump from the 0.4Mb down I was getting under Three!
Although I will note that I have line of sight with the mast up on the roof where the dish went up and yer man said we've 100% signal up here.

Anyway I'll keep an eye on it for a while, I won't be home long enough to do a few speedtests over the weekend but I'm sure mum will get on to me if there is trouble with her emails :pac:. Was relatively easy to set this up with a Netgear router, I just took the settings that the technician put in under IPv4 properties in the LAN connection on the laptop and put them straight into the routers internet page.

Connection constantly 10Mb thru the entire peak time, I should mention I'm on the next generation 10Mb residential package.

Sorry for the quadruple post here,:o but this more or less wraps up my opinion on these guys.

I rang up BlueBox / North West Electronics about the NAT issue. I was told straight away that it was due to routing on their end and I would need a static external IP address set up for the internet so they could do the routing right. This is not standard on a Residential account, but can be applied for with a 35 one off charge and an extra 4 euro a month on the bill.

In the interest of my own sanity (Three wrecked my head for 5 years) I just threw money at them and told them to sort it, which they got around to today. According to TUM NATAnalyzer I now have 100% ok NAT. Was playing CoD on ps3 all day (now NAT Open/2) and got host a fair bit with this tasty upload speed :cool:.

Was seeing some contention (could be due to that DDoS attack going on in Europe though, because my ping was steady when the speed dropped to 4Mb down). The lagometer network statistics on the pc version of CoD 4 is reporting the same kind of statistics as the Eircom connection down in Letterkenny.

In short: Delighted!

No problem, €28.99 p/m since ordering a static IP. No line rental or phone to deal with, pretty good IMO.

NIMAN wrote: »

Yeah that is a decent price.

I used to be a customer of theirs a few years back, but since moved house and am now paying VF €45 per month for 2.5meg BB and home phone.

I might be tempted to consider them when my contract is up with VF, as I rarely use the home phone.

Is their service still unlimited downloads?

Bump this, I too am curious if there is any download allowance restrictions. I'm on Sky Connect's broadband at the minute which maxes out at a pitiful 6mb which would be fine if it was consistent but evening contention ratios are ridiculous. Anyways is there any download cap and is there any way to find out if I can get on their next generation network which has a possible speed of 50Mb which would be really sweet and it seems very reasonably well priced too. After my experiences with Sky I am quite sure I would like to check this out as a good alternative.

Right folks. Let me tell you the truth about NWE blue box broadband service. From someone who's been a customer for many years. It's AWFUL. So why am I still a customer? There's no alternative where I live. No Eircom phone line broadband, and satellite or GSM mobile broadband aren't really an option, but thank goodness for 3 network today. And on the odd occasion when NWE is working flawlessly, its superb, but you know in your heart it's gonna crash any second now - it's been failing most evenings recently. Intermittent and eventually - totally kaput.
It's Christmas day, and I'm posting this from my phone on the 3 network which - whilst it's slow - it works every day, all day. Their mast is right beside NWE's by the way. Any storm or lightning, any momentary power cut, and NWE is off air for hours, maybe days. I swear - I will stand over these statements anywhere any time.
NWE service in my area, St Johnston, is simply terrible. It's off today. It was off about three times this week already. Going by previous experience, I don't expect them to have the broadband service up and running here again until after the holidays. They simply don't do customer service after 5.00 pm or weekends. Or holidays :mad: When it is up and running normally, it drops out every ten minutes or so for a few minutes before i t comes back on. Today, its a serious fault again, and it hasn't come on for quite a few hours. And it isn't just me- all my neighbours have exactly the same non existent service. It's simply terrible, and we can't go elsewhere -Eircom don't do broadband in our area.

Ask NWE if they have customer service after 5.00 pm, or if there's any way to report a loss of service after hours, at weekends or at holiday periods. There isn't, they don't and if they say otherwise, its a damned lie. Ask them how often their Donegal service crashes per week, per month. Ask them if they give a refund for loss of service. They don't. CAVEAT EMPTOR. BUYER BEWARE.

My resolution for 2014 is to kick up hell about this extortionate and deceptive practice by NWE, and the shoddy way they treat their customers. I've had enough of their s**t

Amongst other projects such as a new mast in Galway, NWE have been rolling out a new wireless broadband service in the southern part of the six counties. I saw a report in the local media where the NI assembly minister for Enterprise trade and investment Arlene Foster was welcoming the launch of the new wireless broadband service being launched in her locality by NWE to serve people in remote districts. No doubt a bit of aid from the NI Assembly involved when the minister is popping up for a sound bite. At the same time, they are treating their existing customers in Donegal like second class citizens.
I' m pretty sure they wouldn't get away with the kind of service they are expecting their existing customers served by their Binnion repeater to pay for and just put up with it. They would be brought to account in very quick style by Stormont if their service north of the border was as unreliable as the service we're getting from the same company.
Although there is some kind of arrangement between Donegal Council or the Irish Government and NWE, I' m not at all sure what accountability if any there is, but expecting politicians here to get involved is usually a waste of time. So the Donegal customers might just have to take matters into their own hands unless something is done about this shoddy treatment.
For a start, we could organize a petition to be made to Highland Radio - who gave these people a free platform to promote their service and lavished all kinds of accolades on them just a few years back when the whole broadband scene was up for debate, around the time of the much fanfared launch of "project Kelvin" , including a live interview on a prime programme on Highland with very complimentary overtones for their investment in the sadly neglected Donegal broadband market, a platform which no doubt brought them to the attention of a lot of new customers in Donegal. I wonder if enough dissatisfied customers in Donegal were as frustrated as we are, and were prepared to raise their concerns, would Highland Radio consider doing an investigation into people's' complaints to gauge the extent of these long running unreliability problems,and maybe get Mr McClelland of NWE back into the studio to explain himself and answer to his customers?

In the interests of fairness, I should state that NWE succeeded in restoring broadband service just before teatime on Christmas day. Which goes to show that they ARE aware that there's clearly a problem, and that someone was on standby on Christmas day to deal with it. Usually, and I mean for the past five YEARS it just remains off air over the entire evening/weekend or holiday period. But the fact remains, whatever technical problems they are having, their service is utterly woefully unreliable, and has been breaking down every few hours at least in the past few months.

gctest50 wrote: »

Instead of the pinko commie/whatever plans

- download something like this : http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html ( free for 30 days )

- gather as much as you can with it

- get your neighbours who are also affected to do the same

- now you have something to send them

Thanks for that. When the service is up and running, it's excellent. Something like 3ms to 9ms ping time. No complaints there. The problem is - it just goes dead every few minutes. Gone. No nothing. And then a few minutes later, it's back on. Except some days - like 3 days a week at the minute - it goes dead for hours, or overnight. Can't get a ping then!
That's the symptoms I'm getting anyway, and a few of my neighbours too.

Ive had this internet in for the last 6 months and it is the worst service ive encountered . I wouldnt recommend it to anyone . Im supposedly paying for up to 50 meg broadband and my usual speed is 0.5 meg after 7pm , all weekend or holidays like today where my speed test takes 5 mins to run and gives me 0.10 meg download and 0.20 meg upload. During the week from 9am to 7pm i might get a decent 8meg and i think this is because people are at work or school at that time. This has been like this for 6 months and ive been in constant contact with them weekly with speed tests sent to them. I get the same response of our technical team will look into this . I had a voice conversation once in that time because i demanded it. within the hr my speed jumped to 19meg the most ive ever received . 2 hrs later it was back to 1 meg. I have demanded contact again and so far ive got none . My next port of call is to call down to their office and talk face to face. I understand that there are issues of late weather wise but this has been going on 6 months and has the worst customer support ever. DO NOT BUY THIS SERVICE FROM THEM.

Hi folks, i've been with bluebox / NWE for around 3 years. I'm on the 10mb Next Gen service, and I live just outside Carrigans, co. Donegal. Being a big gamer, i was interested in the 50mb service. I waited for weeks for a technician to come out and tell me that upgrading was pointless. To be fair, my download speeds have been pretty good. I only wanted to upgrade to see if my ping, jitter, and packet loss decreased. When I download a game on Steam, its usually at 1.0-1.2Mbps. However, during the past two weeks i've been experiencing inconsistent speeds and pings, especially upload speed. Perhaps it's the weather, maybe too many people connected to the one mast? i don't know.

I also had the NAT issue that was previously mentioned on my old Xbox 360, but when I rang and asked, they simply said they don't support gaming... So i just lived with it. As of recent however, the main problem for me seems to be the packet loss. I get OKish pings, usually lower than 100, and sometimes if i'm lucky under 60, but the games are completely unplayable due to the huge amounts of rubberbanding (lag). I did a few tests to only find out that it must be down to packet loss. I tested my home network, powerline kit, router, wireless adapters, and all were working perfectly. So i can only blame NWE.

I can understand that the quality of connection will degrade during peak times, but its never usually THIS bad. I think I'll wait a week or so to see if anything improves. If not, I guess i'll have to ring up and speak to them.

Yup, after doing a speedtest to Derry, I'm now getting 0.14Mbps download, and 0.02Mbps up. 272ms ping. Lets just hope they return to work tomorrow!

Update: As of 10pm, seems everything's working again. Well, my connection is definitely faster - 61 ping, 9.87Mbps down, and 1.22Mbps up.#


Update 2: 20 minutes later....


This is frying my head.

I'd love to switch provider, but unfortunately, its either NWE or mobile broadband.. Don't get me wrong, when NWE is fully functioning its great, but as of recent it doesn't seem to be working very often.