IBB in Ballina / Killaloe

thegills

Howdy,
Our Group Broadband Scheme was built last week bi IBB and connections started last week. ot mine today 1Mb Up/Down.
Thanks IBB.
thegills

Ruffty^

Moycullen Galway, our group Broadband scheme also went live the other week. Residential 512k up/down or 1mb up/down.

We are getting it through this group Cellcom (http://www.cellcom.ie/broadband/). Because we need an extra hop since the nearest IBB mast isn`t really in view.

The service isn`t great at all, I had a look at my neighbours 512k he was getting eratic speeds.
Like on a speed test he`d get slightly better than ISDn then it would jump up when you tried again. When I pinged a site like boards or clarity.jolt.co.uk I got pings of between 120ms to 240ms. Should be getting like 20ms to Irish sites and 40ms to english.

And when I did a tracert all the hops timed out. My neighbour had no firewall runing, maybe cellcom have, I dunno.
I sent emails to them but they didn`t respond as I`d have hoped. I`ll send another today and ring them on thursday if I don`t get a response.

How is your bb working thegills?
Anyone else know anything about this?

thegills

Hi Ruffty,
There are only about 10 people connected at the minute so it's hard to gauge. I have a 1Mb Up/Down and lst night I was getting between 700 and 800Kbps. Not bad.
I know IBB get slated here but our community would be lost without them.
thegills

Ruffty^

Yeah, exact same situation for me in moycullen. I just moved to "the sticks" and when I met my neighbour and found out he was working from home on a 56k modem that connects at about 28.8kps I nearly died laughing. Its making a huge difference for businesses and work @home guys. Kind of annoying for us though cause this cellcom crowd have put a 8gig cap on 512 and 10gig on 1meg which is insanely low, BETTER THAN NOTHING THOUGH !!!

Good to hear its working nicely 4u, gives me hope it`ll be rectified. I really want to play games over it, but no chance of that with the preformance it gives atm, I need speed + consistency. Hopefully they`ll get the finger out before christmas anyway!

Sponge Bob

Ruffty^ wrote:

Moycullen Galway, our group Broadband scheme also went live the other week. Residential 512k up/down or 1mb up/down.

Ruffty. I hate to be the bringer of bad news but Cellcom esssentially resells IBB so you rely on IBB for your backhaul and will have the same problems as every other customer of theirs . Cellcom do not have a network at all .

Could you tracert www.boards.ie (open ICMP on your firewall to so do ) and paste it in here for dissection ?.

Ruffty^

I know that, was`t too pleased when I heard about it.
I just got an answer to my email:

"When Moycullen Broadband was instigated, gaming was not indicated as a priority by anyone signing up, and it was never our intention to encourage this sort of traffic.

Gaming can be a heavy weight user as you know and could stretch a system such as this. So right now gaming is simply not on and may never be.

As of December 9th, we will have a faster link from the transmission site at Tonabrucky to the ESB site at Ballybane, where we take our feed. Nevertheless, gaming might not be viable as the system will give priority to the more serious internet user.

Without a serious rethink we will not be encouraging gaming on the backbone feeds.

Best Regards"

Doesn`t look promising?! A load of BS if you ask me, I rang them a few weeks ago and they said the opppsite.
I don`t have the service myself, I tried it out in a neighbours. I was unable to tracert www.boards.ie www.google.ie clarity.jolt.co.uk it just keep going; "* * * request timed out" on each hop. I asked my neighbour did he have a firewall and he said no. Could it be somekind of firewall cellcom have on their mast before it goes to Tonabrucky?? What should I try.

Think I`ll wait till the 9th and try it in my neighbours again, I`ll report back if there are any changes.

Sponge Bob

Ruffty^ wrote:

gaming was not indicated as a priority by anyone signing up, and it was never our intention to encourage this sort of traffic.

With IBB's seemingly standard 10% packet loss in their network you may take it gaming (and VoIP for the same reason) will not be technically feasible anyway.

PM me an Ip address and I will try to ping 'into ' you out of interest and PM you the results , the ICMP data could be suppresed along the way .

Ruffty^

Ruffty^ wrote:

I don`t have the service myself, I tried it out in a neighbours. I was unable to tracert www.boards.ie www.google.ie clarity.jolt.co.uk it just keep going; "* * * request timed out" on each hop. I asked my neighbour did he have a firewall and he said no. Could it be somekind of firewall cellcom have on their mast before it goes to Tonabrucky??

I don`t have the pings or tracert handy. But I remember I pinged www.boards.ie www.google.ie and clarity.jolt.co.uk and the pings were all in the region of 120ms to 240ms. The odd thing was 0 packet loss.
As I already said above^^ tracert wouldn`t work. My neighbour said he didn`t have a firewall, he probably had windows firewall running though. Would that block it? I can`t go messing with his comp, since he works from home and has sensitive material on it.
I`ll wait till 9th dec and try again.

Ronan|Raven

Gaming sure is an intensive task :rolleyes:

jor el

How exactly does a group broadband scheme work anyway? I've read a bit about it but I don't see what makes it different to just having broadband available and signing up in the usual way. I guess I'm missing something.

Ruffty^

It pretty much is the same. Its just that the government helps to pay the cost (under the national development fund) of bringing the infrastructure to villages/ communities.
Unforetunately in moycullen cellcom are jerking us around. They are reselling IBB at a much higher cost and with a download cap of 8gigs on the 512k up/down and 10g on the 1mb up/down. They aren`t even offering IBBs 2mb option :mad:
I heard great news from a mate of mine who has IBB 1mb breeze in the other side of the city. After weeks of mad pings and loss his connection is running well for a change. Some kind of work is due to happen on the 9th of this month on the broadband in moycullen. ATm it is just like my friends used to be, but maybe it will be fixed....
Yet again I`m playing the waiting game, not long now though

Sponge Bob

Ruffty^ wrote:

Unforetunately in moycullen cellcom are jerking us around. They are reselling IBB at a much higher cost and with a download cap of 8gigs on the 512k up/down and 10g on the 1mb up/down

Someone in Moycullen contracted Cellcom/IBB to bring this system out to yiz so complain to them.

Ruffty^

will do! I don`t mean to complain, just highlighting my dealing with cellcom for the benefit of others.

Sponge Bob

Moycullen Community Development Association contracted Cellcom .

HTH

Bemused

Ruffty,

You have been following my other threads relating to trying to get my cellcom connection up and running. While they originally claimed that there was nothing on their end interfering I contacted them today and they are trying to reconfigure my wireless modem from their end. Will report back on what happens.

As regards

"When Moycullen Broadband was instigated, gaming was not indicated as a priority by anyone signing up, and it was never our intention to encourage this sort of traffic.

.....Nevertheless, gaming might not be viable as the system will give priority to the more serious internet user.

.....Without a serious rethink we will not be encouraging gaming on the backbone feeds."

I find this quite irritating. I attended several early meetings relating to the development of broadband in Ireland and there were at least 3 or 4 people out of about 20 that attended who expressed a preference for gaming. The true number of gamers in any broadband population would certainly be higher since a sizable portion of the children of parents who purchase the service would likely use it for gaming.

I would love to know how the "serious" internet user is defined. Downloading porn - that being the heaviest traffic on the net? I am a university lecturer who uses my home connection for work but also to de-stress by gaming. Is this not "serious" use? I might also note that gaming is not at all refered to in their "Terms and Conditions" document. I couldn't care less if they don't "encourage" gaming but they sure as hell had better not ban it. Who sent this to you anyway?

I must stress that I am (thus far) quite happy with them - it is expensive for what it is but when I was (for unknown reasons) able to connect to a German server playing CoD2 it was a great experience with no significant lag.

Will keep in touch until this is resolved.

Ruffty^

Good to hear there are more people interested in gaming. I haven`t got the service yet, I let my neighbour get it 1st and was disappointed. I went to www.cellcom.ie and emailed info@cellcom.ie, to date I have 4 emails from cellcom, the one about "serious" internet use was the last one I`ve gotten so far. I`m pretty sure I`ve been dealing with Andree Higgins each time.

I really don`t have a clue what he was talking about in his last email concerning gaming (i could only laugh when I saw it). Internet gaming ranges from low usage to a max of around 70/80 mb/hour download (thats bf2 with 64players). Now 70/80mb an hour is nothing, that figure would be much higher if you were spending your time downloading porn! cod2 is probably a good bit less than bf2 and hl2 source games.

You said gaming was actually mentioned to them in the beginning?! I also dont give a sh1t what they "encourage", if it is broadband then you can play games on it.
This friday/next monday I`ll check out the connection in my neighbours again, and if its working I`ll be sigining up

TO GAME

and if I am`nt getting low+stable ping with 0 loss they`ll hear ALL about it

Broadband not suitable for gaming, what an idiot. He prob thinks he`s selling satelite :eek:

pointofnoreturn

I have looked into this GBS schemes before and why do they go to the ISP?, i.e eircom, Irish broadband, and Last mile wireless.
Why not just setup your own ISP, get a proper Backbone link and some public IP's. A Fiber connection to the MAM (www.enet.ie) or (www.esbtelecom.ie) then you will have a very reliable connection and unlimited Bandwidth you will be able to provide speeds to the limit of the equipment used.

I thinks theses GBS schemes need a serious rethink to the way the technology is setup. 512kbits is NOT broadband now day! 1Mbit would be boarder line. What happens when VoIP and Video over Broadband get big in the years to come. the investment in networks has to be future proof.

What Moycullen network is suffering from is Contented service. That is your contention ratio is 20:1 so there can be a maximum of 20 people sharing 512Kbits. all it takes is about 2 user to start Peer - Peer sharing and you connection becomes very slow as they will be constantly using bandwidth. Where browsing the Internet casually only takes bursts of data at any one time.

regards ping, if it's from IBB then there's going to be a radio HOP that will give a lag of 10ms to 20ms when there is heavy traffic and not to forget the latency on your wireless link.

if the capacity of the network is going to be a 60 connection then the Back haul will be probably 2Mbits

Sponge Bob

2mbits backhaul will probably cost Cellcom about €4000 a year , uncontended .

they have a nice little earner in Moycullen

oscarBravo

pointofnoreturn wrote:

I have looked into this GBS schemes before and why do they go to the ISP?, i.e eircom, Irish broadband, and Last mile wireless.

Why does the grant go to the ISP? or why does the community go to the ISP?

If the former, because the ISP pays for the scheme, and has the responsibility of managing and supporting it. If the latter, because contrary to what you seem to think, setting up a community broadband network is a non-trivial undertaking. (Ask me how I know.)

pointofnoreturn wrote:

Why not just setup your own ISP, get a proper Backbone link and some public IP's. A Fiber connection to the MAM (www.enet.ie) or (www.esbtelecom.ie) then you will have a very reliable connection and unlimited Bandwidth you will be able to provide speeds to the limit of the equipment used.

Och, nothing to it. Fibre connection to the MAN. Simple as. What could possibly go wrong? It's a wonder everyone's grandmother hasn't set up a community ISP by now.

Bemused

Ruffty,

Problem sorted. They did something to the wireless modem and sent me a new ip address for my router and bingo! Servers galore and a nights gaming ensued (CoD2) with pings of 30-50 on UK servers and 80-100 on German servers. Of note, I remraked that my pings were in the upper middle range of those playing and had just one noticible moment of lag.

Sure it will get worse as more people join but it is the only option out here at the moment. The only way Cellcom will offer a better connection/lower prices is for someone else to enter the market here. Since I have been waiting for 2 years for this service to get up and running I won't be holding my breath.

Ruffty^

Great news! I`ll be signing up very shortly. When pings and speeds are consistently poor we all have to get together and flood cellcom with complaints, that way they`ll buy more bandwidth.
Some guy told me IBB are coming to moycullen next march, maybe some competition will ensue