North West Electronics/BlueBox

chris_ie wrote: »

Still bad here. Ping Response times really high since 2pm. Can see the the hop it occurs on too.

10.20.200.254.

How long will this new problem take to fix.

Hi,

Enough was enough in my eyes so I decided to do a bit of digging on these cowboys. I've been using them for the past 5 years but off late - say Feb 2015 I've noticed speeds dropping, and dropping further the past 2 months or so. The last few nights I've had no connection at all with speedtest coming back with network connectivity issues (on multiple devices). Anyways, I tried calling this morning and no luck so I took a spin over to their offices only to hear the normal guff that it's my router that's causing the issue as they can test from their office. I'm lucky enough to get VF 4g from the house so here I come.

BTW - is yer man who runs the ship not from out Annagry direction?

chris_ie wrote: »

Just got mail from Three there, the one thing that I didnt like about their mobile plans was the 30GB cap. They're upping them now. They have bigger caps, more expensive though. (4G)

20GB = €26.99
60GB = €39.99
100GB = €54.99
250GB = €69.99

The middle ones might suit quite a few people.

Jaysus I'd nearly go for that 250GB one whenever they end the all you can eat plan next June.
I'm payin for 2 ISPs as it is and rarely use that oul NWE crap now.
I'm shocked they have one as high as 250GB tbh, you could terrorize the network bandwidth with streaming at that if you were careful about it.
This modem+antenna I'm using is hitting the max speed Three allows on their 3G masts now so I'd do a fair bit of damage to the cell on 4G :P

Although in saying that, I did go through 1.5TB in the first month I had eFiber in Letterkenny...

I decided to join in to report my experience with them. I sure got a surprise seeing that article about the engineer who left as I was his flatmate while I was at Letterkenny IT back in 2003, although I haven't heard from since then.

My main Internet connection is a Vodafone 5Mb DSL connection, but as I regularly need to upload large files to my workplace, the DSL's 384k uplink is painfully slow. So when I found out North West Electronics was in my area last year, I ordered the 50Mb/10Mb package last September, figuring that if I got at least 1Mb up during the day, it would be worth it.

They finally installed it in February after they missed two scheduled installations in December and January. The initial speed was excellent during the day, typically getting around 20Mb down and 9Mb up. Then near the end of March, it went straight to a 2G EDGE-like connection, practically unusable, e.g. the Independent homepage took 2 minutes to load. After multiple ticket posts back & forth, my connection was back to normal a week later. I had a similar issue again for the last two weeks of April, again taking several posts to convince NWE that it's not my end.

From May until 23rd of August, it was mainly fine during the day hitting 20Mb down and 9Mb up, falling back to around 10Mb down and 3Mb up in the evenings. The south west of Donegal is likely the reason I got these speeds as I haven't come across any other house in my area with a similar dish shape antenna aimed at it. On the 23rd of August, the connection went totally down until the evening of the 24th August.

Whatever they did on the 24th August, my uplink since then has been practically unusable and I have got nowhere contacting them. After getting just their general explanation of how contention works on my last response, I logged a complaint with ComReg at the start of October and this is still on-going.

My typical speed test at the moment is around 6Mbps down in the day and tends to fall to as low as 1Mbps in the evening. My uplink is around 0.1Mbps during the day and sometimes goes under 0.01Mbps in the evening. I use TestMy as Ookla's Speedtest keeps timing out during the upload test. Ookla's app also seems to measure the burst speed rather than the average throughout. Intermittently, my uplink will spike back to 9Mbps (sometimes up to an hour) and then returns back below 0.1Mbps. There's nothing in line of sight of the dish and their mast (which I can see with binoculars) and the speed tests are the same even with my laptop connected directly to the Ethernet cable from the gable-mounted 'dish'.

Meteor 3G finally came to my area a few months ago, so my plan is to cancel NWE once my contact ends in February (I paid the full year upfront as I didn't want to use direct debit). I only get a very weak 3G signal on Meteor, but with a high gain LOG antenna in the loft connected to a MiFi dongle, I'm peaking around 10Mbps down and 0.6Mbps up using a prepay SIM, which is a vast improvement over what I'm getting on NWE, plus I have the DSL connection for my main downloading and streaming when fast throughput is not required.

So far there's no sign of Three's 3G service coming to my area and I can't pick up their network even with the large LOG directional antenna. Vodafone 3G is in my area, but they don't have any decent data allowances.

At this time of checking (9:15pm), I'm getting on TestMy UK server speed test:
Vodafone DSL: 3.7Mbps down - 306kbps up
NWE Bluebox: 941kbps down - 49kbps up
Meteor 3G: 9.8Mbps down - 407kbps up

Just to show it's not a contention issue, I ran another speed test at 9:16pm, about the same time as yesterday and got 15.25 Mbps down and 9.38 Mbps up on TestMy, which is unusually quick for this time of evening on NWE.

I then started a test FTP upload to my host and it went at 1.1MB/s for the first 9MB, then fell to about 10KB/s. About 3 minutes later of crawling along, I aborted the transfer and ran another speed test and got 5.58 Mbps down and 54 kbps up. It went out completely for a few minutes at 10:10 and at the moment, I switched my PC back to the DSL router as web pages are very slow to load on NWE again.

The impression I get is that point-to-point links within their wireless infrastructure are cycling up & down.

You guys seem to be more tech savvy than myself, perhaps you can answer this. The 4g wifi device from VF is great where it's positioned but there are some spots around the house where the signal is weak. Is there a wifi extender that I can buy to extend the signal throughout the house, bearing in mind there's no Ethernet ports on the device, or for that matter no ports at all (bar the usb to charge it).

Thanks,
Bob.

Over the weekend, I set up a script to run speed tests with TestMy on a 30 minute interval as I wanted to get a few 24-hour graphs. I intended running it on Monday also for comparison to the weekend, but the tests ended at 6:30am Monday morning due to the link going down and remains down at the moment. Trace route ends at 172.20.200.1, which someone said is the IP of the mast I'm connected to and unlikely to be fixed until the windy weather improves.

For anyone curious (I can't post images here), the peak linear speed (single download) during these tests was 5.09Mbps down at 1:30am and 9.31Mbps up at 4:35am, both Sunday morning. The peak multithreaded speed (simultaneous downloads and how Ookla tests) was 16.22Mbps down at 6am Saturday morning.

I was quite surprised there also, especially with the uplink still approaching the 10Mbps limit between 4am and 7am.

April and May were my best months where the speed varied between 20Mbps and 30Mbps during the day. The record download speed test I got was 39Mbps on a multi-threaded test and 30Mbps on an actual linear transfer (FTP download hit 3.7MB/s for several seconds). I can't find the screenshot of the 39Mbps test to get the date (assuming I saved it), but am fairly sure both were during April in the afternoon.

It was downhill from June onwards with the peak download speeds gradually dropping, first to around 25Mbps and then to 20Mbps around July. I'm fairly sure I haven't seen a multi-threaded speed test above 16Mbps on my NWE link since August.

The following are the multi-threaded test results in the hours of Saturday morning (7th Nov):
12:30am - 10.82Mbps down / 282Kbps up
1:00am - 13.78Mbps down / 9.02Mbps up
1:30am - 15.79Mbps down / 288kbps up
2:00am - 13.99Mbps down / 1.26Mbps up
2:30am - 15.32Mbps down / 4.66Mbps up
3:00am - 15.14Mbps down / 2.79Mbps up
3:30am - 15.23Mbps down / 500Kbps up
4:00am - 11.32Mbps down / 5.82Mbps up
4:30am - 15.51Mbps down / 9.21Mbps up
5:00am - 14.90Mbps down / 9.10Mbps up
5:30am - 15.06Mbps down / 9.16Mbps up
6:00am - 16.22Mbps down / 9.16Mbps up
6:30am - 8.65Mbps down / 9.26Mbps up
7:00am - 15.25Mbps down / 9.25Mbps up
7:30am - 14.63Mbps down / 8.63Mbps up
8:00am - 14.99Mbps down / 9.26Mbps up
8:30am - 9.09Mbps down / 3.92Mbps up
9:00am - 12.64Mbps down / 8.7Mbps up
9:30am - 9.14Mbps down / 122Kbps up

editorsean wrote: »

My link came back up when I returned home on Friday after being out since early Monday morning. However, after just a few minutes of usage, I was back on DSL as websites were slow to load and YouTube was dropping down to 240p at times.

With an ESB planned power outage on Saturday, I started a scheduled test that evening which is currently on-going so I can produce a 24 hour graph for Sunday and Monday.

To continue on the above post, this is how my speed looks this evening (Sunday), again with multi-threaded download tests:
6:00pm - 290 Kbps down / 28 Kbps up
6:30pm - 250 Kbps down / 18 Kbps up
7:00pm - 1.25 Mbps down / 47 Kbps up
7:30pm - 1.32 Mbps down / 124 Kbps up
8:00pm - 308 Kbps down / 35 Kbps up
8:30pm - 266 Kbps down / 765 Kbps up
9:00pm - 309 Kbps down / 1.09 Mbps up
9:30pm - 1.14 Mbps down / 374 Kbps up
10:00pm - 701 Kbps down / 13 Kbps up
10:30pm - 281 Kbps down / 394 Kbps up
11:00pm - 852 Kbps down / 193 Kbps up

The uplink throughput on my link sharply fell off around 9am and the downlink throughput sharply fell just after 3pm with the peak downlink measured at 1.68Mbps at 4pm. Speed tests through the early hours of the morning were similar to the above post.

Running regular tests like that will definitely flag you for throttling and is unfair to others that are in the same congestion ratio as yourself.

I think I was told before that they don't throttle, although I dont know whether I'd believe it or not. I was told before by customer service that anything over 1GB a day was excessive, but this was after I had been complaining about speeds and they were "looking into it", then they tried to blame my downloading. I had downloaded some XBox One games through XBox Live before which are huge.

They don't specify caps but use a fair usage policy. The majority of my downloads that are large files, I schedule for download between 3am-8am. This is where I think fair usage should come in instead of a cap. Would you rather have someone downloading 100GB in the very early hours or have someone downloading 3GB at 8PM.

My speeds are always 1-3MB these days, so going by what they say that would mean that alot of people are flat out downloading every day. Which I dont think is the case, there are other issues on the network or else the 48:1 contention is wrong. That may be the case as the last time I downloaded around 4am I think it hit around the 20MB mark but you'd expect to hit the 40-50 mark at least one or twice in those hours.

If NWE are as bad as you all say, are there no other wimax providers such as Imagine or anything else in Donegal?

I think if the people on here had other similar options then they wouldn't be on this thread

I'm down to 0.5MB download this evening. Three 4G is out here but its not much faster at the minute. If the speed increase I might be temped with one of the packages now that the caps have increased. Although, anytime I had done a ping to NWE servers from Three I always got 0% packet loss for 200-400 packets. However the same test from inside NWE to NWE's own server resulted in 5-10% packet loss. But I was told this was not an issue :rolleyes:. NWE connection is ok for downloading anything in the middle of the night seeing as its usually faster, hardly anyone using it and I'm not bothered how long it takes. During the day is a different matter...

TireeTerror wrote: »

Where in Donegal are you located? Does where you live have 4G coverage on the three coverage map? Anyone else got anything to say about three 4G in Donegal?

Im asking because Im probably moving up that way within the next month and I will be leaving UPC on 243Mb behind!!!! I know I cant get ADSL but 4G coverage on map shows outside coverage, so I was thinking about buying some external dish and booster.

Aw man, it will tough leaving that behind!! I'm about 7km outside Letterkenny. There is a Three mast not too far from me (Churchill), it was 4G enabled quite a while back. In the first few days speeds were around 10MB, still get that some of the time but alot of the time its around 3MB. They've told me they'll be doing more upgrades but dont know when that will be. I got the 'Big Upgrade' message a while back also but there was no difference and when I contacted them they said it was just maintenance. So it was a bit misleading.

The magic Eir blue lines go past my door so hopefully that wont be too far away!

I must try an extended ping test on NWE the next time my link is up to see how it compares at my end.

My NWE connection went down yet again today and this time the trace route ends at the hop after my router, so the mast I'm connected to appears to be down. I cycled the power to the antenna to reboot it, but no change. So another reply to the lengthy ticket.

TireeTerror wrote: »

Anyone else got anything to say about three 4G in Donegal?

In Ballybofey where I work, the Three 4G speed is quite erratic and varies from below 1Mbps to over 20Mbps. However, as I have a prepay mobile, this may be different from their mobile broadband if the give their mobile broadband connections a better QoS.

The following were a few speed tests on both Three and Meteor when I checked both at work around 2:40pm. However, as I head home at 5pm, I'm unable to check the evening speeds when people mainly go online:

Three linear connection and multi-threaded, LTE (4G) showing a full signal:


Meteor linear connection, 3G showing a full signal:

chris_ie wrote: »

The magic Eir blue lines go past my door so hopefully that wont be too far away!

That would be really nice. :cool:

Going by the Eir "Where and when" map, the blue line stops at the 4th house before mine.

editorsean wrote: »

My NWE connection went down yet again today and this time the trace route ends at the hop after my router, so the mast I'm connected to appears to be down. I cycled the power to the antenna to reboot it, but no change. So another reply to the lengthy ticket.

They hardly get back to me now. I've reported issues and they keep telling me to the same crap, connect direct to router, do speedtests, take a screenshot and paste into a word document! I sent them the links to speedtest.net and explained I had done the tests connected directly but they insist on that rubbish. So after doing that a few times and nothing being done I refuse to do it anymore so they say they wont do anything :rolleyes:

editorsean wrote: »

Going by the Eir "Where and when" map, the blue line stops at the 4th house before mine.

They might stretch that bit further if ya slip them a tenner