Dial-up has become completely useless.

uncle_sam_ie

Dial-up has become completely useless. I'm on vodafones €49 unlimited data card, which is great if you are in a 3G area. I on the other hand am not, so it's dial-up speed for me. With the way the web is moving forward dial-up speed is painful at best. Last night I tried to surf to Yahoo for a movie review and just getting to the front page took nearly three minutes. To get to the page I wanted was like waiting for a song to download. Thank god for RSS. A 25MB files will typically take me about an hour to download. Its crazy I'm pay €49 a month for this. My contract is up in september and it won't be renewed and I won't be going back to eircom. It looks like It's come down to begging and steeling for access to the net. As far as I'm concerned if you can't get broadband then your not really on the net at all.

Urban Weigl

Any chance you may be within 3's 3G coverage area, or is there some WISP in the area that might cover you? Back to 3, they've improved their coverage a lot in the past 6 months in rural areas I hear, and the map on their web site is out of date.

Also, how far are you from the next 3G base station do you think? It may be possible to connect with an external, directional antenna. I've even seen photos of people putting up 24dBi grid antennas!

1huge1

yes 3's 3G coverage is a lot better than vodafones

as for me im using isdn and for loading pages its fairly fast maybe you might give it a look

Urban Weigl

ISDN is expensive, though. It's a smidgen under €70 a month for about 150 hours (150 hour package and ISDN line rental), and that's for 64kbps. 75 hours at 128kbps. Or am I wrong here? That's what it cost when I last looked into it.

Come to think of it, BT Ireland offer 180 hours for the same price, but again you need to halve that if you're using 128kbps.

uncle_sam_ie

Urban Weigl wrote:

Any chance you may be within 3's 3G coverage area, or is there some WISP in the area that might cover you? Back to 3, they've improved their coverage a lot in the past 6 months in rural areas I hear, and the map on their web site is out of date.

Also, how far are you from the next 3G base station do you think? It may be possible to connect with an external, directional antenna. I've even seen photos of people putting up 24dBi grid antennas!

Hi Urban Weigl
I'm in Castletownroche north Cork. Like you I'm four miles from a DSL enabled exchange. If it was unbundled I could probable get DSL. Apparently Smart can go 7km were as eircom will only go 5km. As far as 3G goes ,I'm 6 miles from Fermoy and the 3G coverage there goes out about 2-3 miles. Do you reckon an external directional antenna would work for me? Would you need a really good line of sight? Ironically I'v got a beautiful line of sight with eircoms mast in Kildorrery, but according to eircom wireless is unavailable. We had a group scheme going that was going to do wireless, but they pulled out. I don't blame them. The market here is too risky to invest. My only real option is to sell up and move, but if it comes to that I'll leave Ireland altogether. Hows the broadband situation in Australia?

uncle_sam_ie

1huge1 wrote:

yes 3's 3G coverage is a lot better than vodafones

as for me im using isdn and for loading pages its fairly fast maybe you might give it a look

ISDN is what I was using before I went to vodafone. The always on is what made me switch, but the slow speed is just making it really useless. €49 a month for this, it's really killing me.

Urban Weigl

I'd say a high gain external antenna would probably work. You don't need actual line of sight, just NLOS. For example, I'm 3 1/2 miles the way the crow flies from Ballyhaunis (my phone line is 4.2 miles long, though), and I'm not line of sight where I have the 3G router located, but at the same time there aren't any huge hills in the way, there's just one hill that's slightly in the way, and lots of trees, AFAIK. It works well with a "Good" 3G signal. I am told an external antenna can boost things to 20km, depending on the down-tilt of the 3G base station and terrain. So I'd say it would probably work, though I don't know your terrain.

uncle_sam_ie

Urban Weigl wrote:

I'd say a high gain external antenna would probably work. You don't need actual line of sight, just NLOS. For example, I'm 3 1/2 miles the way the crow flies from Ballyhaunis (my phone line is 4.2 miles long, though), and I'm not line of sight where I have the 3G router located, but at the same time there aren't any huge hills in the way, there's just one hill that's slightly in the way, and lots of trees, AFAIK. It works well with a "Good" 3G signal. I am told an external antenna can boost things to 20km, depending on the down-tilt of the 3G base station and terrain. So I'd say it would probably work, though I don't know your terrain.

Thanks Urban Weigl,

Do you have any web links to were I can get an external antenna and the install info? Is it a DIY friendly job?
This could be promising.

Urban Weigl

Yeah, it's "DYI friendly". I'll try and find a supplier for this kind of kit again. Basically you're looking for a "UMTS antenna". You need something high gain and directional, I'd say 14dBi minimum, ideally higher. I can't guarantee that it will work, but if the terrain is fairly flat, e.g. there's no hills really in the way, there's a good chance that it will.

NLOS stands for Near Line Of Sight, not Non Line Of Sight.

Creamy Goodness

Urban Weigl wrote:

ISDN is expensive, though. It's a smidgen under €70 a month for about 150 hours (150 hour package and ISDN line rental), and that's for 64kbps. 75 hours at 128kbps. Or am I wrong here? That's what it cost when I last looked into it.

Come to think of it, BT Ireland offer 180 hours for the same price, but again you need to halve that if you're using 128kbps.

just a note on using isdn with BT, they will not allow you to use isdn full duplex (128k) on IOL anytime 180.

it's only eircom that will.

thank god i broke away from them shackles long ago.

thegoth

I have broadband in Dublin where I work during the week. Can only get dial up when I go home at weekends. Hight recommend you buy onspeed. www.onspeed.ie

Its a compression tool for dial up. Makes it about 3-4 times faster. Lose image quality though

uncle_sam_ie

Urban Weigl wrote:

Yeah, it's "DYI friendly". I'll try and find a supplier for this kind of kit again. Basically you're looking for a "UMTS antenna". You need something high gain and directional, I'd say 14dBi minimum, ideally higher. I can't guarantee that it will work, but if the terrain is fairly flat, e.g. there's no hills really in the way, there's a good chance that it will.

NLOS stands for Near Line Of Sight, not Non Line Of Sight.

I'd really appreciate it you could find that supplier for me. Is this the kind of thing I'm lookin for? http://www.trendnet.ie/product_info.php?cPath=41&products_id=155 The terrain here is flat, but there are loads of tree's, so I think I'm okay.
PM me if you want.

Urban Weigl

The frequency range for that is too high, it needs to be 2100, not 2400. Also, 24 dBi is probably overkill. Lower gain antennas are easier to install, as they're smaller and easier to aim.

cgarvey

Guys, please take the specifics over to the Wireless forum.. there's a couple of threads (with links to suppliers as well) over there if you just search. Ta.

.cg

1huge1

Urban Weigl wrote:

ISDN is expensive, though. It's a smidgen under €70 a month for about 150 hours (150 hour package and ISDN line rental), and that's for 64kbps. 75 hours at 128kbps. Or am I wrong here? That's what it cost when I last looked into it.

Come to think of it, BT Ireland offer 180 hours for the same price, but again you need to halve that if you're using 128kbps.

150hrs works out at €39 through different deals here and there
not including line rental i think but im not the bill payer...
though i rarely use 128kb because i just dont bother downloading things with this speed unless its small
and 64kb is grand for loading pages preety fast tbh
and the family is using on average around 130hrs so all is good

Urban Weigl

That would be even more expensive than I thought, I had assumed it was only €29. €39 would bring the total to almost €80 a month (including ISDN line rental).

thebman

Although it won't solve your problems, I recomend downloading a proxy server to cache the larger sites content that you frequent. This will speed up browsing a lot on 56K connection and you can get proxy software online for free.

I also use the Opera web browser as it allows you to switch off downloading images altogether and allows you to only display cached images. When in this mode, it does not send requests for images and so the text on a website will load faster so if you want that train timetable in a rush you can get it. It also allows you to right click and load a particular image if you need to see what it is (like quote image on this site although images on most sites have text alternatives that appear if you have images disabled in Opera.

It ain't perfect but it will make it a little more usable. I share your pain, I'm less than a mile from our local exchange but it is in a pretty rural area so it won't be upgraded for years yet.

watty

Almost all browsers allow browsing without images.

Set any proxy up properly so it can't be used by other people on the internet.

1huge1

ya you're right
if it wasnt for the cache my isdn would seem a lot slower
all the same websites load a lot quicker with isdn than with dial up
is there anything else to it beside the speed of 64kb because it seems a LOT better than 56kb dial up

watty

56K is mostly really 33K to 46k and has errors dropping TCP traffic down to a real speed of 20K to 40k depending on error rate. The higher rates use compression.

64K ISDN is a real error free real 64k. So with on the fly compression it can in real terms be twice as fast as a 56k dialup running at 40K. My own tests over many years sugguest you can run about 15 people of a 64K ISDN if they are only web browsing and it has a "dialup equivalent speed" of closer to 80k or 90k.

Using Sage accounts and the NT4.0 on the fly compression on a direct ISDN dialup the real data rate was around 100k.

Downloads of Music, jpeg or Video won't compress so these will be slower on ISDN, but much slower also on dialup as packets lost/error must be resent. ISDN provides error free connection.