IBB go slow

jesus_thats_gre

Hi

Is it just me, or is IBB gone dog slow?

As i type, I am downloading at 9.05kb/sec through bit torrent and doing a bit of browsing. The max rate I can get browsing is 0.5kb/sec.

Thanks

Scratch Acid

I'm getting this, also.

Moonbeam

Check what's running in the backround

jesus_thats_gre

There is nothing crazy running in the background, i.e. i regularly check for spyware and have an updated virus scanner.

It has improved somewhat now, it may have been a short term problem or bandwidth was getting hammered.

On a side note, I called IBBs tech support and spoke to a lad there. He said something that I cant help thinking and hoping is wrong. I am on their 512 kb symetrical service with a 8:1 contention ratio. He basically said that the reason for the poor data transfer rates were to do with the fact that the 512kb feed that I am on is equally contented between 8 people. I clarified what he was saying by asking was it not a similar to DSL services whereby (Eircom example?) a 2mb pipe feeds a DSLAM and this is contented between whatever amount of people. He was categoric in the fact that my 512kb is shared with 8 others..

Is this the case? I would content it on their side and not between the transmitter and customers.

Moonbeam

The slowest speeds that they guarantee is
ur bandwidth / ur contection so 512k/8=64kb/s .

But that is not the constant speed that you should be getting just the minimum

uteotw

it's been fluctuating a lot in the past weeks but I've noticed that it seems restricted to certain protocols.

nntp is can be quite slow, even though I can verify that it's not a server issue as another pc on another connection is downloading full speed.

I can double check that by simply starting a http download. Suprisingly it download full speed while the nntp is still crawling.

One thing is sure: IBB throttle its customers connection, they told me so. They allocate more bandwith to business user during the day but you should never get under your contention ratio.

The last I heard from them it was supposed to be from 6am until 6pm on working days, but given my logs I don't believe this is true. I'd say it's more like 6am until midnight... even at weekends. And I'd say they target P2P and other heavy file transfer protocols.

Also, if you stop downloading for a while (let's say a day) the speed comes back... that's strange... not !

jesus_thats_gre

I have been getting strange behavior myself. I really hope they are not being sneaky about it.

Moonbeam

utetow- e-mail them and ask them,
That way u have it in writing:)

halenger

Originally posted by Moonbeam
The slowest speeds that they guarantee is
ur bandwidth / ur contection so 512k/8=64kb/s .

But that is not the constant speed that you should be getting just the minimum

Hold on there a sec. 512 kilobits per sec / 8 = 64 KiloBytes per sec.

If I'm not mistaken that's the absolute MAXIMUM speed you can get. That does not relate to contention at all.

Mutant_Fruit

he used a small k and b, that means kilobits. 64 kilobits is only a mere 8kilobytes (kB) and that is the absolute minimum.

You gotta love the whole bit (b) Byte (B) thing.

Moonbeam

U are

kb = Kilobits

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by Moonbeam
The slowest speeds that they guarantee is
ur bandwidth / ur contection so 512k/8=64kb/s .

But that is not the constant speed that you should be getting just the minimum

So what you are saying here is that I am guaranteed a download rates of 64k/byes per second and not 1/8th of this?

The way the tech support dude suggested it work was that the 512 k/bits or 64k/bytes was equally contended between 8 people. Are you saying that 512 k/bytes or 2096 k/bits is contented between 8 people

Mutant_Fruit

So what you are saying here is that I am guaranteed a download rates of 64k/byes per second and not 1/8th of this?

AS was said in BOTH posts above yours, you are guarenteed 64kb a second, which is 64 kilobits a second, which is 1/8 of the 512kb a second your line is capable of.

If you want the figure in kB (kilobytes) that is a minimum of 8kB and a max of about 64kB.

fester

My understanding is that IBB don't guarantee download speeds at all.

Recently my speeds have been good (~40KB/s) but i've been using mostly at night. I thought that it used to be slower during the day because more ppl were online, not that there were any privilages been given to businesses.

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by Mutant_Fruit
AS was said in BOTH posts above yours, you are guarenteed 64kb a second, which is 64 kilobits a second, which is 1/8 of the 512kb a second your line is capable of.

If you want the figure in kB (kilobytes) that is a minimum of 8kB and a max of about 64kB.

Thats what I was thinking but just wanted to clarify what was said before. Thanks for clarifying it anyway.. God why is it the simple stuff I always forget Poxy computing degree!

uteotw

The contention ratio is garanteed... it's in the contract.
So, if by adding up several download threads (let's says 4) spread across several protocols (hhtp, ftp, nntp, p2p), obvisouly 4 different sources, you cannot reach the contention ratio then there is a problem.
When I had real problems t was due to terrible pings, above 500ms if not 1000ms, that were impacting the download speed. This was due to interferences (2.4ghz) , this got fixed by an upgrade to VL equipement (5.7ghz).

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by uteotw
When I had real problems t was due to terrible pings, above 500ms if not 1000ms, that were impacting the download speed. This was due to interferences (2.4ghz) , this got fixed by an upgrade to VL equipement (5.7ghz).

My pings are very eratic as well... They average at say 40 ms to boards... but it spikes every 3rd or 4th one.

Moonbeam

Fester -They do, so if ur a normal res user ur guaranteed slowest speed is 512kb/20=26kbps

Mutant_Fruit

jesus_thats_gre: if you're averaging about 40ms, thats not too bad. Spikes could be caused by other programs accessing the internet, such as spyware/malware/adware (whatever you want to call it). I average about 10ms to boards, but i do get spikes up to 90-100ms occasionally, but i generally ignore those results, i assume its just windows (or something else) choose that moment to check in on the internet.

However, if it spiking so much that it affects in-game playing, and download speeds a lot, then complain away.

When I had real problems t was due to terrible pings, above 500ms if not 1000ms, that were impacting the download speed. This was due to interferences (2.4ghz) , this got fixed by an upgrade to VL equipement (5.7ghz).

Exact same problem and solution here. My bad pings were over 1000ms, at times over 1500. Connection was all but unusable (check old threads from about november 2003 if you want). All working perfectly now though with the VL gear, so i'm a happy bunny.

I've only had bad speeds (averaging 20-25kB/sec) once that i noticed, so all in all, i'm very happy.

uteotw

About the pings I usually do it with the o Default Gateway and DNS as I had to "prove" to IBB that the problem was with equipment and not with the network traffic further down the pipes.

40ms isn't bad... it's not the best IBB can provide but it's very decent.

When it works great I'm between 10ms and 20ms... to DNS.

MrVestek

I have been using IrshBroadband for just over a year and I have to say the download speed has been **** during the day, It's a shame I have to use such terminology, but I am highly pissed off calling them and being sent to dowload from a stupid ftp site just so they could test the download speed. This week alone I have had to call them three times, I couldn't even chat on irc. I have the 512kb upload and download speed connection which should guarantee me a minimum of 8 KB per second download speed, and sadly this is not the case, I called yesterday and got the stock reply from the tech guys after pinging the default gateway which , by the way didn't work , normally I get 4 ping replies,: 50% loss .. IE 2 of the pings didn't even return a reply. So .....the tech guy said he would send me an email stating an ftp address to download a 10mb file, but strangely enough the email didn't arrive until tech support had gone home 17:30, and eerrily my radio was reset just before the email arrived and GUESS WHAT ... my connection literlally jumped in to life. So being an obliging git I went to the site and downloaded the 10MB file at roughly 35KB per sec, which was NOWHERE near the speed I had been getting all week. This morning (friday 2-7-04) I got an email in reply from tech support telling me that I no longer have a problem . I suspect they did something with my radio before I went to the download site for my "test" download. Also I agree with one of the earlier comments about being punished for p2p downloads, my connection is quite good at night and I DO use it to download stuff ... but every time I do that my connection really does seem to slow down for a few days.... Port blocking?????????
anyways... thus endeth the rant ... I could talk all night here, but it's just sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo irritating the way they treat their residential customers.. .......

Phibsboro

Hey, I used to be a very satisfied IBB customer, but i too have had awful trouble over the last few days. I always thought the "Im being punished for P2P" brigade were overwrought conspiracy theorists but at this point im not so sure!

From a rational point of view, my feeling is that all my troubles are down to bad pings (as per previous posts, sometimes failing 50% ). This gives huge delays in surfing (like minutes!) and causes my MSN to acutally log out thinking the internet has been disconnected. I called IBB and a lady reset my radio and sure enough I got better download times. As per previous post, this didn't last and by that evening I was back to a snails pace (literally waiting minutes for a http page to update).

Irrantionally, I begin to quetion whether IBB are really chasing the p2p users - by co-incidence I had been using bit torrent this week and the lady on the support line made of point of saying that my average the previous day was higher on upload than download (I always get killed on BT!). Logic tells me that there is no way IBB are together enough technically or organisationally to do this. At this stage in their product life cycle they want happy customers not suspisious ones and they appear to be hard pressed to keep up with demand for new installations and support without implementing some throttling based on what program u use to access the internet.

So if its not deliberate what is it? Support knew of no know failures, so its not planned maintenance. Its not their pipe (although some Irish sites do seem quicker than foreign ones). Its not contention cos the rate just dies at various points for minutes on end. The horrible implication of all that is that it is interference, which appears to be a nightmare to diagnose or fix. Hopefuly not! My optomistic money is on internal upgrades/issues within IBB network that haven't filtered through to support...

C

Moonbeam

tech support had gone home 17:30,

They have phone support until 19:00

I always thought the "Im being punished for P2P" brigade were overwrought conspiracy theorists but at this point im not so sure!

I still reckon they are

uteotw

anyway... surprisingly my download speed has been perfect for the past 3 days, days and nights !!! I don't know what they've done but I hope they leave me alone

Phibsboro

I tiried to post a reply earlier but it died cos my IBB connection is dead:( Hopefully this one will sneak thru.....

quote:

---

I always thought the "Im being punished for P2P" brigade were overwrought conspiracy theorists but at this point im not so sure!

---

I still reckon they are


Which is exactly what I said in my post! I can't believe that IBB have the where with all or desire to filter based on originating application. But they have definitely had problems on the guinness mast in the last few days to the point of bring my browsing down to a crawl...


C (heres hoping this one actually posts!....)

uteotw

speak of the devil.... my nntp downloads went dead at 9:45am this morning... for no good reason !

The nntp server is well alive as I have remotely access to machines downloading from the same server... tsss tsss tsss

Phibsboro

just to finish this - everything is back to normal today. I rang support to tell them about my weekend woes. They knew of no maintenance or other reasons why it should be so. They did say that weekends were very busy download times but accepted that this should not really be screwing up my pings to my default gateway. All very strange.

Just in case anyone technical is reading this, my situation over the weekend was that my browsing was glacial speed (likes minutes to log into hotmail), I had very high (high 100's) pings to gateway and anything beyond that (www.irishbroadband.ie for example) usually gave 50% failed, the other two high 100's or 1000's. However, if i went to the IBB ftp site and started a large ftp download, while it would take a while to get started it would download at around 40kB while is good. All very confusing

As I say its all back to normal and support say they will monitor my situation but if anyone can add a technical explanation for those symptoms it would be interesting.

Thanks,
C

uteotw

things are back to normal as well....

Phibs, what you describe it exactly what was happening to me. All I can say is that you should keep monitoring your pings to DNS and Gateway at various time of the day, everyday for week. IBB won't move until you've cornered them into accepting that the problem is on their side.

Phibsboro

what mast r u on uteotw? Tho my feeling is its not mast specific... Tho then how come we haven't had a ton of people on complaining? I do wish IBB had support forums on their website so we could get a feel for how many people had a problem.

BTW, IBB support monitor this forum so I wonder if they would de-lurk and offer a few words?

C

Mutant_Fruit

BTW, IBB support monitor this forum so I wonder if they would de-lurk and offer a few words?

There was a chap here before, but he got blasted out of it (probably not intentially), but he left anyway. Ye old proverb about shooting the messenger comes to mind...

Anyway, what you're describing about the high pings/packet loss is EXACTLY what happened to me. It dragged on for a few months, and then was 100% fixed when they changed my equipment to the business stuff.

My advice is to badger them into giving you the business stuff, OR get them to give you the new 3.5ghz stuff (if you're in range of a compatible mast). Talk to anyone and everyone until you get one of those two options. Nothing else will solve the problem.

Moonbeam

BTW, IBB support monitor this forum so I wonder if they would de-lurk and offer a few words?

They do?

There was a chap here before, but he got blasted out of it (probably not intentially), but he left anyway. Ye old proverb about shooting the messenger comes to mind...

By the looks of it he just got a bit frustrated cause it appeared the information been supplied here and what was happening were 2 different matters

My advice is to badger them into giving you the business stuff, OR get them to give you the new 3.5ghz stuff (if you're in range of a compatible mast).

It ain't going to work unless they can see a serious problem with your connection.

What kind of speeds are u getting?
what are ur ping times to their dns servers/defualt gateway etc?

Phibsboro

Hey Mutant,

I don't think its the same thing here. I am already on the VL gear, have been from day one. And usually my connection is fine. So its something that happened over the weekend. But not to everyone obviously - I assume u were fine Mutant? I'm going to set up a script to capture pings over the next week or so, this should help pin point whats happening.

C

Mutant_Fruit

Oh right, didn't know you were on the VL, it slipped my mind Anyway, i did notice some patchy times over the last week, but they didn't last more than a few minutes at a time, so i forgot about em til now. Basically i was getting random packetloss, but no high pings. Nothing that interrupted my service for more than 2 minutes, and it only has happened (that i noticed) 4 or 5 times over the last week.

By the looks of it he just got a bit frustrated cause it appeared the information been supplied here and what was happening were 2 different matters

Maybe your right, what i heard was that he left because people were constantly complaing about stuff to him and repeating the same questions etc, general bitching. And thats why he gave up and left. I dont know.

vishal

it is a shame chaz is gone. it is always nice to see businesses communicate with there customers and he always provided useful info.

Moonbeam

I got confused and thought u meant the guy that posted a few weeks ago

uteotw

Phibs, I'm on 3Rock... but even with the VL there can be problems... may be you're part of an over crowded "sector". IBB had to change my VL gear once because they couldn't connect to it or monitor the quality of the signal...bla bla bla. At the time I had very irregular pings and/or downloads (including web pages), but it wasn't due to the equipment itself they said. The guys said I was on a busy "sector"... or something like that. So after changing the hardware they changed my "sector" assignement and thing went smooth again.

Phibsboro

Thats interesting - Im having another nightmare night tonite - ive been trying for two hours solid to post a reply to this thread I just managed to get into Hotmail after hours of trying so heres hoping...

C

Moonbeam

must have been well worth trying for 2 hours to post that reply

HelterSkelter

Lads,

why do you put up with IBB? They have being having the same problems since early this year and don't seem any nearer to solving them.

I went through all the same crap, slow download speeds, bad pings, calling/emailing tech support with not joy, resetting radios, downloading file after file from ftp site to test speed, IBB blaming contention....

So I wrote a letter to IBB complaining (letters always get a better response, I believe emailing is a complete waste of time if you are complaining). Got a reply from Jeremy Nel (Executive Director) and spoke to him several times on the phone. He tried to resolve the problem but in the end he conceeded that they could not fix it. After some "negotating" he agreed to cancel my contract and refund me for 3 months.

I switched to IOL and it's great (the way IBB was for the first month I was with them), downloads always 50KB/s plus, fast pings and no downtime.

uteotw

When IBB works... it rocks !!!

Except that glitch last sunday... my download speed is very very good for more than a week. I'm a happy camper.

Reasons I put up with IBB:

1. unlimited download , like anywhere else in Europe ! They are the only one to offer it at a decent price.

2. avoid Eircom , if IBB wasn't around I'd go with NTL (if possible) as any other ADSL ISP has to use Eircom's lines.

I think IBB works fine for most users. They've had and still have problems but they're being resolved (slowly)... their support process has improved, their network performance has also improved. Many people have issues (including me once in a while) but the 3.5ghz should fix this. It's always the unhappy minority making most of the noise.

HelterSkelter

1. unlimited download , like anywhere else in Europe ! They are the only one to offer it at a decent price.

Even if IBB imposed limits, I would never have reached them as my connection was so bad! My IOL is cheaper than IBB.

2. avoid Eircom , if IBB wasn't around I'd go with NTL (if possible) as any other ADSL ISP has to use Eircom's lines.

I hate €ircon also, but I won't bite off my nose to spite my face. I'd rather pay for a reliable service with €ircon/IOL/UTV than put up with IBB's amateur operation.

Chaz

/me still oaccasionally reads these threads.
Im just suprised that no one has put 1+1 together yet. Really surprised.

Phibsboro

Moonbeam - thanks for the contribution! I had various long replies written that reflected my situation during those hours - as none of these got through, my replies became terser til you got my final one basically saying here goes nothing I subsequently tried a more comprehensive reply but guess what - it wouldn't post All your replies seem to suggest incredulity that IBB would have any problems - do you work for them by any chance? I take that back - I have a feeling that if you did work for them you would have a fairly realistic view of the problems they face

uteotw - I agree with you - in general I am an IBB fan - they were available to me when I failing dsl (passing now but hey), they are uncapped, they are free from eircom and so far the support has at least been knowledgeable - I am not dealing with first level biddies ala eircom. But obviously when it doesn't work its very frustrating - and it ain't working at the minute As for helter, if you read back through his woes you'll see it never really worked for him and IBB should have cut their losses there sooner. It has worked for me and I want it back not out of my contract.

Chas - That intriguing! I followed some of your history and basically you are down in cork now and also got pissed off with some of the trolls going after you. But what one plus one do we need to add to get two? Do give me a hint!

To update, my connection this morning still wasn't great. I have emailed support a graph showing my pings to gateway/dns/various websites over the last 12 hours or so. They are monitoring my connection... Could someone else use pinggraph to monitor dns and gateway and let me know what it looks like? pinggraph is free for monitoring two addresses, http://www.xmission.com/~infix/pinggraph/pinggraph.htm. Don't do more frequent than 5 minutes tho or we'll look like a DoS attack

Cheers,
C

HelterSkelter

Originally posted by Phibsboro
As for helter, if you read back through his woes you'll see it never really worked for him and IBB should have cut their losses there sooner. It has worked for me and I want it back not out of my contract.

I got IBB in July (I think) of last year and it was fine for 2 or 3months, I was very happy with it.

Phibsboro

My bad - i take that back so. I was under the impression it had never worked for you. Oh dear....

C

Moonbeam

I have a 1mb vl connection off three rock and rarely have problems

Chaz

I have been full time in Cork since beginning Feb. I know what goes on in the company to a certain extent, but I do not have the day to day movements on Dublin network planning and issues.
So, from my side, I cannot offer much help as Im not involved day to day anymore.

One thing I promise, 1+1 = 2.

Phibsboro

Hey Chaz,

I went to post a PM to you asking for more when I had a sudden insight into what 1+1=2 is and was bathed in a (weakish) light of knowledge. Oh god! I hope Im wrong - if what I think is correct then it looks a bit silly from IBB's point of view! And I'm at a loss to square the after hours interest in anatomy and physiology...

C

madden

I got 2mbit and I'm very happy with the speeds games are pretty good too

Mutant_Fruit

if what I think is correct then it looks a bit silly from IBB's point of view!

Enlighten us, we're not all that intelligent, i can't figure out a good meaning from the 1+1=2 thing

Kevok

Chaz,

Are the problems recently due to the much promised upgrade to the 3.5 gear? Has it been tried out? Whats the performance like?