Why aren't we hollering?

dub45

Is there any technical reason why customers of Eircom should get better speeds that customers of UTV, Esat etc?

1. If there is then what is it and why aren't we hollering about such a thing being allowed to be in place? Surely its not what the Gov or Comreg envisaged? And again if there is a technical reason then all potential customers of Esat Utv etc should be warned of this as they are signing up for a lesser quality product.

2. Now if there is no technical reason for lesser quality for non Eircom customers why arent we hollering very very loud that this in fact appears to be the postion in lots of cases?

Whatever the truth is - if either situation is allowed to continue it will not further the cause of broadband in Ireland not to mention annoying a lot of folk who are paying out a lot of money for a product that for a lot of the time is not much better than a good dial up service. (and thats a lotta lots!)

mickger

I agree, this should not be happening and UTV and Esat should be getting a roasting for not getting on to Eircom about this crazy situation.

Davey Devil

I never knew Irish people "hollered". Where are you from????

dahamsta

This won't be a popular opinion but I guess it's too late for me to start now:

I think it's rapidly approaching the time when Internet users have to come together to form another pressure group, one with closer links to the grassroots than IrelandOffline. IrelandOffline has become a political animal, and while I respect that they believe strongly in what they do and that they work hard at it, their focus has changed dramatically in recent times.

They're pushing hard for wireless because that's the path they see forward, but this tight, futuristic focus is leaving the grassroots - the actual people connected and trying to connect to the Internet right now - behind and unrepresented. If they can rethink their organisation to better represent you and me, well and good, but if they can't others are going to have to step into the empty space that's been left behind.

Whether that's as a "wing" of IrelandOffline or a completely separate organisation isn't for me to say. Personally I'd favour a grassroots "section" of IrelandOffline, but I favour non-political activism, and IrelandOffline may be concerned about possible harm to the political connections they've worked hard to build; which is is a legitimate concern.

Anyway, just said I'd kick it out there. I honestly feel under-represented by IrelandOffline these days, I think that they're thinking clearly and logically about the future, which is excellent, but while they're doing that the present is going to pot. There is definitely an Eircom Net bias on the bitstream products, we no longer have a USO, and PPC's are going to cost more than leased lines. Something's going seriously haywire, and we need to be pragmatic and get things fixed, by hook or by crook.

adam

SkepticOne

I'm not saying this is the reason, just a possible reason.

All the RADSL services are on a 48:1 contention ratio. This means that the average maximum possible download per user is around 3.25 gigs. It is possible to download more than that but only if other users download less than 3.25.

On a highly contended service, the activity of the users is likely to have far more effect than any network constraint.

UTV and ESAT currently allow 8 Gig downloads but Eircom only allow 4 Gigs.

In addition to the larger cap, heavy users are more likely to choose UTV and Esat and use the cap to the maximum where as users of Eircom are more likely to be attracted to the 'always on' aspects of the service, so less users are likely to even use 4 gigs. Basic browsing and the occasional download is unlikely to use up more than 2 gigs a month.

So even with no shinanigans on the part of Eircom, I would expect UTV and Esat to be slower than Eircom based on the users they are likely to attract and the higher caps.

dub45

I never knew Irish people "hollered". Where are you from????

I am from Dublin and think we are far too accepting and need to holler more or whatever you want to call it is fine by me if it gets some attention like it did from you!

dub45

So even with no shinanigans on the part of Eircom, I would expect UTV and Esat to be slower than Eircom based on the users they are likely to attract and the higher caps.

This to me raises a number of issues but for now I just wonder for instance how true that would be in the case of UTV are they likely to have sufficent number of subscribers on any exchange to explain the poor speeds a lot of their customers are apparently getting?

And it also raises the whole question of a guaranteed level of service but I was going to raise that in a seperate thread!

SkepticOne

Originally posted by dub45
This to me raises a number of issues but for now I just wonder for instance how true that would be in the case of UTV are they likely to have sufficent number of subscribers on any exchange to explain the poor speeds a lot of their customers are apparently getting?

The overall service is 48:1. Even if there is only one user at an exchange, that user will be contending with users from other exchages. It may be possible for UTV to supply more bandwidth into the system but this would cost a lot of money and even if they did, they would hit contention problems at the exchange level because Eircom also restrict bandwidth coming into the exchange. Every 48 users at an exchange gets 512k. It is quite possible that a single exchange has 48 or more users.

Why not ask what the problem is on UTV's support newsgroup?

And it also raises the whole question of a guaranteed level of service but I was going to raise that in a seperate thread!

I don't think any residential DSL provider will guarantee bandwidth particularly on a highly contended service like UTV's.

BKtje

Didn't some one explain this less than a week ago?

From what i recall Eircom have route directly from the exchange or something (or have more bandwidth to reroute the data) while esat/utv have to have the data routed to them through pipelines which are being overloaded. UTV/Esat have the option to buy more which is why it aint anti competitive behaviour.

This coupled with their lower caps and probably lower med-heavy user uptake.

This is from what i recall of the post and is quite probably flawed. Please point out any mistakes.

dub45

I don't think any residential DSL provider will guarantee bandwidth particularly on a highly contended service like UTV's.

How come UTV's is so highly contended?

Ripwave

Originally posted by dub45
How come UTV's is so highly contended?

All the services are 48:1 contention ration on paper. But, as someone else pointed out, people who don't think that 4G a month is enough are plumping for UTV rather than eircom, so 48 eircom customers will use a lot less bandwidth than 48 UTV customers, so the eircom customers will experience less contention. (If everyone on a 48:1 service tries to download as much as they can, then they'll get an average of about 3GB a month each - that's a simple calculation. You can't get 8G in a month unless there are either less than 48 people on that 48:1 circuit, or there are lots of people who are getting less that 3G).

There are also bigger network issues. I've been told that eircom.net has connections to the eircom.com IP network in a variety of places (cos they don't actually have to pay for them), whereas UTV and IOL only have one or two connections into eircoms DSL network, so all their customers must be routed back to those interconnect points. That will obviosuly have some impact too.

It seems likely that there's a considerable amount of cross subsidisation going on between eircom.com and eircom.net. I don't know if this is illegal, or just typical rat business practice (legal, but you wouldn't want your mother to know about it).

pron

Ripwave is pretty much spot on in this case.
With RADSL:
There's (as far as I'm aware) no real-terms shortage of bandwidth back from the exchanges to the central points run by eircom themselves. These authenticate the users and assign the traffic to the ISPs servers. This is where the 48:1 contention bites. The backhaul to the ISP is done over IP in 2meg pipes. These pipes are shared across 192 customers, and eircom don't seem willing to sell more bandwidth to the ISPs until they have > 192 customers on a single IP path. Being on IP this causes problems ... users 1 - 4 start heavy downloads ... they all get full speed and max the 2meg line. Users 5 - 192 now all have poor ping response times, bad bandwidth problems, and 12kbps downloads - if they're lucky !

With ADSL:
There is a direct virtual path back from the exchanges over ATM to the ISPs BAS (Broadband access server) which authenticates the user and backhauls to the ISP over a minimum of a 16meg ATM path. 24:1 contention *is* enforced at exchange level here ... and it's the path from the exchange to the BAS that see the contention. But this being ATM it can at least enforce a minimum amount to make available to every user.

Yes - these are high level overviews ... but as far as I'm aware they're accurate. There are also rumours that eircom want to supply all bitstream products over IP. This itself would be a disaster for the ISPs brave enough to offer higher effective caps.

Martin-UTVi

I don't think any residential DSL provider will guarantee bandwidth particularly on a highly contended service like UTV's.

Just to remind you that the DSL service offered by Eircom is contended - we do not contend it any further (at present!). The 48:1 is implemented purely by Eircom.

The backhaul to the ISP is done over IP in 2meg pipes

Or preferably E3/D3 (34/45mbps) pipes.

This is something we are currently investigating as we have yet to see any of these issues within the UK where there has been a more agressive takeup of broadband.

Martin.

mickger

So you are admitting then that there are "issues" with the service you are providing us at the moment with regards to awful browsing speeds which sometimes are as slow as 56k ?

Martin-UTVi

So you are admitting then that there are "issues" with the service you are providing us at the moment with regards to awful browsing speeds which sometimes are as slow as 56k ?

If it was as simple as a blanket issue I'd be very happy. Unfortunately it does seem to only affect certain indivuduals and does not correlate to the exchange they use. UTV owns several companies within the ROI using our own BB service and everything is well. Our own bandwidth is nowehere near saturation, internal network and routers are running fine so it is difficult for us to believe the problem lies within our network (although obviously we are dchecking everything). So now we are going back through the chain trying to establish if there are any definate contention issues - if there are then we will be pushing for them to be resolved.

Martin.

mickger

I appreciate what your saying and i would love to be someone who is getting a good service but its not much of a concelation to the many out there that are getting a pretty average service to say the least. We pay our 47.50 a month too and to be not getting what was advertised is just not on.