Chorus 6mb in Cork Review

Akula

Hi,

Just got this fitted recently, so going to post up my impressions.

Package is the 6 meg down 512 up for 39 a month.

1. Fitting
The guy did the job ok. But didn't have much technical knowledge. Getting goog technical knowledge from Chorus has been tricky.

2. Modem
I got a motorola box. Pretty basic. Can log into the box using a web-browser but the interface is incredibly basic with very few options. I just have mine hooked up to a linksys router which I use for all of my configuration.

3. Ping times.
Rough averages.
bbc.co.uk 32ms avg
boards.ie 52ms
google.ie 132ms

Ping times broadly were better to the UK rather than Ireland. This seems to be because tracert shows that pretty much all traffic is going via the UK even if going to Dublin.

Traffic to the US seems to go via London then Paris then New York. That was based on a tracert to google.com

4. Download speed.
VERY disappointing.
Really with a 6 meg connection I would have been hoping to get more than 600kbytes a second.

Downloading from FTP, using heanet (and other ones) as a test at one stage I was only getting about 80kbytes per second... Peaked at a little under 200kbytes.

Downloading from bittorrent. I left it running overnight and monitored the speeds achieved. It peaked at around 415kbytes but that was only for a couple of minutes over a several hour time period. Was averaging around 200kbytes.

Since this was faster than using

Guessing there is pretty heavy contention on the line.

Used speedtest.ie a number of times. It has reported our speed as being anything from 1.3megs to 4.2 megs, averaging about 2 megs in reality.

5. Upload Speed
To be fair most of the time this has been fine, been peaking at about 90kbytes and showing as about 490 on speedtest.ie so this was fine for the most part.

This mornign however my upload speed collapsed. Speedtest was showing a download speed of 17KBITS!!! Extremely disappointing. Not sure if this is a contention issue, but it should never be dropping this low.

Those are my initial observations. Probably going to get in touch with chorus today to see how good they are at responding to these issues.

However as much as I can understand that contention exists, the system has peaked at only about 2/3rds of its advertised speed and is averaging more than that.

Seems to be realiable in terms of being up so far, but too soon to make a realistic judgement on that.

Am happy to conduct any other tests people want.

Tazzle

hey, thanks for the overview of their service. I was definitely looking for some kind of information like this. Never was a big fan of Chorus. Seems to be compounded here. Anyone else have Chorus in Cork?

bk

Akula wrote:

4. Download speed.
VERY disappointing.
Really with a 6 meg connection I would have been hoping to get more than 600kbytes a second.

Try downloading two or three iso's from heanet at the same time, if the combined speed isn't close to 6m, then contact Chorus and they should be able to fix it.

My friend in Cork has Chorus 3m, he initially had the same problem with the download speed, but when he rang them they were able to fix it over the phone.

RangeR

Or try downloading a couple of ISO's from different networks.

I downloaded about four 3GB ISOs over the weekend to see what the download would peak at. I used bitcomet and I actually max at about 700 to 800 KB/s. Now that's fast.

It all depends on who is seeding and how fast they are seeding.
It also depends on how fast a website can offer the download to you. I have heard that some websites have a max of 4MB upload [download to you] devided between connections.

In a nutshell, I have no problem with Chorus at all, but it's only new to Naas and probably not many ppl using it.

DemonOfTheFall

IrishTLR wrote:

It all depends on who is seeding and how fast they are seeding.
It also depends on how fast a website can offer the download to you. I have heard that some websites have a max of 4MB upload [download to you] devided between connections.

ALL websites have a limit to how fast they can send information to the user. For most sites it will be 100mbps split between all connected users. Unless you use a download manager which initiates many connections simultaneously to build up speed you won't be seeing even near your 6mbit. I'd suggest Internet Download Manager if you want to get decent speeds out of a Chorus/NTL cable line, I have mine doing 8 or 12 concurrent connections to get reasonable speeds. (Yes, I know that I'm a server raping jerk, I don't care).

Akula

All fair points. I'll play with it some more tonight and post an update.