Opinions on UPC broadband service and installation

c0y0te

I'm currently on Magnet/Netsource DSL and - based upon other threads here - I don't think I'll be getting the benefit of any upgrades anytime soon because they are not impacted by the Eircom upgrade work.

Then today I see a news item about UPC launching new broadband speeds from 1st July like 20mb down/1.5mb up for only €40 month. I'm paying that now and only getting 3mb/down and 384K up... so I'm wondering if it's worth switching to UPC.

Anyone got any experience of, or recommendations about, UPC and their broadband service/support?

-ADREN-

Have to say, I have dealt with there sales team, customer care, and there technicians, and they were all fine!

Well apart from the first technician who hadnt a clue and told me I couldn't get it, so I just rang again and got another one out and bingo got it.

When they say an techy is going to be there on such a day to install it, he will be.

Installation, took bout 15 mins, and was up and running wirelessly straight away.
Ping times are great (limerick), and im downloading off Rapidshare via Free download manager at 1,4mb on the 12mb pack

So, so far so good, no complaints and delighted with it. Having said that only have it about 3 days

Gluck,
-Coz.

Kotek Besar

Can't fault it. I'm currently on their 12mb and have no complaints at all..

Chris_533976

A lot of people on here will slate them, but I've had them since May and no problems at all. On their 12mb service with phone and basic TV. Great stuff. Cheaper than the rest by far and so far I havent had a nightmare with customer service like others talk about.

GerardKeating

benifa wrote: »

Can't fault it. I'm currently on their 12mb and have no complaints at all..

My only compleint is that i am moving house in a few weeks and cannot get NTL-BB there...

I am soo going to miss it..

c0y0te

OK - so I checked with UPC and they can offer me a 20mb downstream / 1.5mb upstream at a 17:1 contention ratio for only 46 euro (inc vat) per month.

I then checked with Magnet to see if they had any competitive offer and the bottom line is they don't.

So it looks like a switch to UPC is a no-brainer doesn't it?

c0y0te

I've just gone and ordered the new UPC 20mb "Ultra" broadband service with a yummy 20mb/1.5mb bandwidth profile at 17:1 contention with an unlimited download limit... and all for only €46/month

They tell me that they can install this on Saturday next, so pretty much installs within a few days it would seem.

I thought I'd start a thread on the installation and setup experience because I'm assuming that - like me - a truck load of you are also going to order this massive bandwidth.

So - anyone else on the "wait" list for this beauty this week?:D

Moriarty

Threads merged, subject changed.

Tak3n

Are they any good?

20mg for 40 quid sounded too good to pass up...

paulm17781

See the 20 page thread about it..

conceited

smart are doing a 50 meg now.
:eek:

Crann na Beatha

This post has been deleted.

egan007

Had 8 meg in before with Chorus - A technician came around to fix it one day (a subcontractor but working for chorus) to see why i was not getting the speed.

He explained to me that Chorus were not capable of providing 8Mb! (that was this time last year)

Unless they have implemented some serious network upgrades recently I'd be interested to hear if you actually get the speeds...

Moriarty

Threads merged again

Cabaal

Ordered NTL back two years ago, install was quick, price was ok, never had to call support, downtime happened alright but generally it was down when I was at work or rebooting the modem fixed it.

I was also always able to get the full 3MB speeds out of mny 3MB line, if I could get services from them now I'd certainly go back to them but sadly I'm stuck with bit-stream resellers.

Cabaal

conceited wrote: »

smart are doing a 50 meg now.
:eek:

Don't you mean 15MB?
http://www.smarttelecom.ie/residential_package.html

barnicles

Cabaal wrote: »

Don't you mean 15MB?
http://www.smarttelecom.ie/residential_package.html

Maybe he means magnet

zAbbo

Have the 10Mb on order myself, installation in a few days.

Free installation, and 2 months half price is a nice enough deal for €396 a year

Chopper Dave

Possibly a stupid question but like most houses we have our Eircom phone point in the hall and the UPC Cable point in the sitting room.

If you go for the UPC phone and broadband, are all services connected to the TV point in the sitting room or do they install an additional point for the phone and broadband?

Cabaal

Seems to depend on the engineer, but if you ask they may run a cable from the TV point to another location if you ask nicely

I know they offereed with me but I didn't bother,

Duffler

Cant fault the service or the installation. Just got the 12MB line into the apt and zippy as hell. Strangely though i'm averaging 20MB lines speeds on rapidshare downloads. Downloaded an ahem 700MB "File" in about 4 mins..I really dont know myself as the previous house had a 2mb line. Amazing how 2MB line now sounds like dial-up!!!

rc28

LOL you are actually now on the 20mb package as the 12mb was upgraded to that free of charge on July 1st. U also have no cap now- download as much as you like

AtomicHorror

Were all of the 12Mb accounts upgraded? I've had the 12Mb BB for about 2 months now with no issues. Whilst the installation of my BB was quick and painless, the customer service I've recieved hasn't been the best. Nothing like the inept cluster**** that is BT or Eircom mind you. By comparison UPC are just fine.

Just yesterday my BB went out along with my digital TV. Not sure what the problem is. Half hour phone call to UPC saw me bounced between three different customer services people, the last of whom was clearly not very confident about what she was saying and was having trouble working her computer. They said there's no local problem where I live. No resolution to the issue so I'm booked in for a technician on tuesday. Bit disappointing that I'll be without TV or internet for 4 days but hopefully that'll be the end of it.

dylanpp

I'm on BT 3mb. I favour lowest ping times more than download speed. BT has been failing in this regard for months now.

I have an engineer calling tomorrow morning from ntl to install the 10mb. I have a number of questions if any1 could answer them!

1. phone upstairs and in kitchen - both miles away from ntl socket in living room. how does that work? i told the ma nothing would change ;p

2. are ping times extra low? stable? do they change wildy depending on time of day and contention? (im a cs player so i'd be pretty pissed if i have 12 months of s***)

hit me quick!

c0y0te

OK.:D

I got the 20mb install on Saturday eventually, and the actual installation was pretty painless and quick.

So far the only real issues I have are as follows:-

1) It's not really 20mb yet, more like 15mb. The tech tells me they are working on winding up the bandwidth to max it at 20mb within a week. The downstream is cool at 1.5mb though.

2) For some reason I keep getting 'connection to online services lost' when I play ETQW - which never happened when I was on the 3mb DSL line from Magnet.

Anyone got any ideas?

c0y0te

For what it's worth...

I contacted UPC today and they tell me there is an issue with the UPC modem (not the netgear item), something to do with power consumption/output, which is causing the 15mb presentation and the drops in quality of service.

They are sending a tech over tomorrow to sort it out hopefully, so if you hit the same issues give 'em a shout.

zAbbo

I'm getting installed tomorrow, What was the presentation of the connection like? was it a tidy job.

I've my own wireless AP.

McDermotX

Definitely interested to hear about people's new installations

Like, what was the quality of the job done ?
What modem router is supplied ? Tech specs ?
Where is the installation point ? Main point in living room (as in off the same point as TV), for example, or can they install in another room upstairs etc etc
Leaving PC aside, how do people find the connection when using with PS3, 360 etc

Cheers

c0y0te

Regarding the installation and specs, mine went like this:-

Techie turned up within the appointed slot (usually a 4 hour window of AM or PM).

He twiddled about outside the house at the cable junction and then ran a cable from my box on the wall to my PC (I'd already had cable a few years ago so he just reused the same one).

Then he installed a UPC cable modem (Scientific Atlanta) which takes the cable feed and also ran an ethernet cable from that to a Netgear Wireless Router they provide (Netgear Model WGR614 V7) and a cable from that to my PC.

The rest was some login details (user/pass) and some setup in the Netgear router (wireless network as well as admin settings) and five minutes later it was all up and running.

All I'm waiting on now is this visit tomorrow to hopefully correct my connection issues (currently showing 15mb instead of 20mb and dropping QoS frequently) which they reckon is a power issue with the cable modem.

The whole thing took about 10-15 minutes to install.

McDermotX

Cheers c0y0te
Sounds good

Irish Gunner

Coming around this weekend to install BB & Digital tv

Have a few questions

* Current phone socket upstairs with wireless router. Is it a simple case of them plugging it in?
* What is the router and easy to set up Wep or Wpa & portforward?
* Anything I need to ask the installer ?
* Anyone know their newsgroup addresses?

If anyone else got it installed and thinks I need to ask more let me know

Aquos76

They wont be using your existing phone connection. They will be using a cable connection, the same connection which is been used for your TV points.

The router they supply is a netgear which is straightforward enough to set up. The installer will usually set this up for you with wep enabled.

With regards to the installer, make sure everything is working as it should be before he leaves.

Newsgroups, I dont use them, so cant really comment. Sorry.

Irish Gunner

I have tv point upstairs in main bedroom and one downstairs. So I want the wireless router to go in the spare bedroom so do they have to put another tv point in and will they charge me for this ?

Aquos76

Irish Gunner wrote: »

I have tv point upstairs in main bedroom and one downstairs. So I want the wireless router to go in the spare bedroom so do they have to put another tv point in and will they charge me for this ?

No its all part of the installation

Irish Gunner

So they do put an extra one in but dont charge me this correct ?

Thanks

Aquos76

Irish Gunner wrote: »

So they do put an extra one in but dont charge me this correct ?

Thanks

Yeah, thats it

Moriarty

Threads merged.

Irish Gunner

Cheers thanks for that so another extra tv point

Irish Gunner

Anyone know of the model number of the netgear wireless modem they supply

Just want to check if and how I can forward ports on this from www.portforward.com

Thanks

Get0fix

Another user posted these details in the previous page Irish Gunner.

The router supplied is a Netgear Model WGR614 V7.
By default you wont need to do any port forwarding, the netgear will pass all data through. If however you did enable the firewall settings and locked down the router, there is functionality to forward ports, so don't worry, your torrents will work fine!

Irish Gunner

Get0fix wrote: »

Another user posted these details in the previous page Irish Gunner.

The router supplied is a Netgear Model WGR614 V7.
By default you wont need to do any port forwarding, the netgear will pass all data through. If however you did enable the firewall settings and locked down the router, there is functionality to forward ports, so don't worry, your torrents will work fine!

Sorry did not see that about router just saw model name.

Have Zonealarm so will check on portforward & settings on this

Torrents you say nah not me Newsgroups now thats something...:)

Get0fix

Well no difference really. As long as your ZoneAlarm firewall is accepting data on your newsgroup port, you should be fine.
Like I said before, the routers generally pass everything straight through, and if they don't, you will have full access to the routers web interface to make changes.

Lenny

coyote, wht do you mean by dropping of QOS?
Your connection keeps dropping is it? The gf had the ntl aswell and got given that netgear stuff,
terrible stuff!
connection kept dropping, had to keep going to "repair" connection in the internet settings.
and then the router just packed it in totally, wasn't sending out a signal at all!

Aquos76

Lenny wrote: »

coyote, wht do you mean by dropping of QOS?
Your connection keeps dropping is it? The gf had the ntl aswell and got given that netgear stuff,
terrible stuff!
connection kept dropping, had to keep going to "repair" connection in the internet settings.
and then the router just packed it in totally, wasn't sending out a signal at all!

The very same happened to me when I got installed about 2 years back. I think I used the netgear for about 2 weeks and decided enough was enough and ordered a Linksys wrt54g v2.0 and have never looked back. A fantastic router with some excellent third party software available for it too.

I am on UPC 10mg package and I can manage 1.1mb d/l speeds over my wireless network, mind you I have added these to it to increase my range on it.

My brother has recently had UPC installed and he is having terrible trouble with his netgear also. Sometimes it takes an age to pick up a internet connection. If he has to carry out a reset it may take ages for him to be able to get back on line.

c0y0te

OK - so tech number 2 turned up today and confirmed that there was a power issue at the entrance to the estate. Basically the 'upgrade' lads are still working on the system and the main junction at the entrance to the estate where the cable comes in acts as a transmitter to the nodes on each street (apparently!).

It seems the 'power' issue is that the TX is wound up too high. Currently my UPC status shows a Transmit level of 61.0 dBmV, and it needs to be below 55 dBmV before I can get my 20mb bandwidth, or so I'm told.

The 'upgrade' lads are going to have a look at the estate tomorrow and tweak the settings on the distribution hub... so hopefully that will get me the full whack of bandwidth and maybe even sort out my QoS issues.

The saga continues...

Irish Gunner

One more question

When UPC install the BB and have to create a new tv point as I dont want to plug in router to existing points

Do they have to run wires from the existing tv point to the new one ?

Have 2 tv Points one downstairs and one upstairs but dont want wires going all over the floor ?

So will I be tripping over the wires ?

Irish Gunner

Got it installed this morning and getting the below speeds



Is this normal thought it was 20mb?

Do not supply wireless adapter even though I asked them on the phone and the said they would. They put in new pont for BB although the installer was a grumpy little so and so when I asked him to do this

Also bloody phone has to be plugged into another box not the phone line did not know this? Router is Netgear WG 614 have not checked about ports yet

Aquos76

Irish Gunner wrote: »

Got it installed this morning and getting the below speeds



Is this normal thought it was 20mb?

Do not supply wireless adapter even though I asked them on the phone and the said they would. They put in new pont for BB although the installer was a grumpy little so and so when I asked him to do this

Also bloody phone has to be plugged into another box not the phone line did not know this? Router is Netgear WG 614 have not checked about ports yet

Download this file for a couple of mins and let us know your transfer rate.

Irish Gunner

Transfering at 1.7-2.0 mb/sec took 6 mins

Aquos76

Anywhere between 2mb and 2.2mb is what you should be getting. Yours speeds are just about right so.

Irish Gunner

Cheers thanks for that

Forwarded ports and there are no incoming connections on utorrent when I checked it said it was not open?

Getting crap speeds as a test couple of peers so maybe no seeds?