Best Internet Provider in Kilkenny City - stability and speed

DerryRed

I'm living over in Ashfield near the Castlecomer Road, and I've been on Eircom Broadband for the last 4 years. However I'm not happy with the speed of the wifi service, even though I'm on their best available package. For example I did a speed test yesterday of the wifi and I was getting a download speed of 428 kbps.

With that said the Eircom service is very stable, with hardly any downtime in the last 4 years. For me this is very important as I work from home.

I'd be interested in hearing what people think about other providers available in the town. What is the speed of service and also how reliable is it - is their much downtime?

Raze_them_all

Using upc in town, think it's great for online stuff, only ever seems to go at like 3 in the morning!

Benny Cake

+1 on UPC great speed and decent stability, also allows access to thepiratebay....

wobbles

If you hook it up to the modem directly, what speeds are you getting. If your getting proper speeds, then it could be your router, and you could need a new one

fabbydabby

UPC. All the way. I am getting 13.5 megs down and 1 up, which is deadly for a 15 meg connection. It's very stable and gives no hassle.

UPC are standing up for the rights of the internet users in not passing on any user details, IP addresses etc, to record labels in the way those cowering wretches Eircom are.

This is probably in direct violation of a citizens right to privacy and IRMA (I think, though it could be EMRO - always get them mixed up) are taking UPC to court over it, but they are holding strong, which is why I am happy to give them a few bob each month.

Raze_them_all

+1 Upc actually value their customers.

DerryRed

wobbles wrote: »

If you hook it up to the modem directly, what speeds are you getting. If your getting proper speeds, then it could be your router, and you could need a new one

Thanks for that tip. I always assumed that Wifi would be slower than a direct connection. I'll give it a go tomorrow. I've had my current router for coming up on 4 years, so maybe it's time for a change.

Deliverance XXV

I have always wanted to try UPC for the extra speed, better value and the better latency but €ircom have being fairly perfect to me with a near perfect uptime. My upload speed ain't great and sometimes my ping is terrible at peak times which is slowly killing me inside so it's only a matter of time before I change over.

I doubt it is your router but if you feel it's an issue try a cabled connection at the phone splitter point and post up a speedtest.net image. If it's still slow could you borrow a friend's router and test?

These are my stats for Eircom in the Hebron area at the 7Mb bundle.

fabbydabby

Unless you live in Japan or Hong Kong or somewhere that actually has a decent broadbrand infrastructure ('knowledge economy' me bolix) your wi fi speed should be well in excess of your internet connection's speed.

Obviously this is a function of your computer's distance from the router, so you should try plugging straight into it and do a speedtest to see where the bottleneck is. You'll never get what's advertised, so if you're on 3Meg, don't expect to get 3Megs down. Do it at off-peak times as well just to be sure.

If you're using an older generation eircom router and you live in a densley populated area, it could be a distinct possibility that there are scumbag student types (or unemployed computer heads- there are many these days) leeching your bandwith to their own ends, because the first generation of netgear routers are a piece of p1ss to hack into if you are still using the default password eircom gave you - even easier if you're using no password at all. There's a website that generates the default password for you (the algorithm was leaked back in the day) when you enter the SSID.

So change your password.

WEP secured wi fi is also easy peasy to brute-force crack, but you need a little bit of know-how to do that. WEP is well on the way out now anyway but I knew lads in college that used to download gigabytes every week free gratis off the neighbour's wi fi (presumably choking the thing to unbearable slowness on an almost 24 hour basis).

Not that I approve of any of this behaviour, of course.

These are all factors why your broadband could potentially be so crap, but i would say that the main reason is that Eircom suck pole. Also speedtest.net is not based in Ireland and not very acurate, there's a better one but I cant remember it

DerryRed

Deliverance XXV wrote: »

I have always wanted to try UPC for the extra speed, better value and the better latency but €ircom have being fairly perfect to me with a near perfect uptime. My upload speed ain't great and sometimes my ping is terrible at peak times which is slowly killing me inside so it's only a matter of time before I change over.

I doubt it is your router but if you feel it's an issue try a cabled connection at the phone splitter point and post up a speedtest.net image. If it's still slow could you borrow a friend's router and test?

These are my stats for Eircom in the Hebron area at the 7Mb bundle.

Was on the phone with Eircom engineers this morning, and the issue is resolved. It was being caused by my Sky Box being connected to the phone line!!! Unplugged it and now I'm getting 3MB download speed!!

highgiant1985

those who use UPC have you ever had to contact the customer service? if so any issues?

I'm having trouble with them at the moment. That said other than the customer service I'm quite happy with them.

wobbles

UPC is grand until you have a problem. ive had to deal with them in the past and my god are they very VERY poor when it comes to customer service. Huge waiting times (over an hour one night), little knowledge of the actual product, and when UPC provided a seperate router to the modem (all the one now) they would fob you off to netgear saying it was their problem, when it was NTL's own fireware on the router that was causing the problem.

But overall im still with them becuase when it works, its still better than anything else out there in my area

frankie2shoes

I'm using perlico out here near cuffesgrange. paying for 3 meg broadband and getting 2.49meg.
not bad at all.
customer service is pretty good, will even try to help with routers they don't officiallly support.
.

m4rkiz

upc is really good, you have full speed and they usually do all maintenance late in the night, so outages are very rare
once this year at pococke afair

on the other side if you have any problem you can't really count on their customer support at all & technicians will visit you after nearly a week of waiting

comparing to eircom broadband that i used when i lived in athy it is cheaper, much faster and more reliable, if you can have 15Mb from upc it is best what you can have in kilkenny i think

fabbydabby

Totally agree with highgiant, wobbles and m4rkiz about the UPC customer service. I could write a few thousand words on how crap and infuriating it is, but once it's ticking over you'll be sound.

Plug

fabbydabby wrote: »

UPC. All the way. I am getting 13.5 megs down and 1 up, which is deadly for a 15 meg connection. It's very stable and gives no hassle.

UPC are standing up for the rights of the internet users in not passing on any user details, IP addresses etc, to record labels in the way those cowering wretches Eircom are.

This is probably in direct violation of a citizens right to privacy and IRMA (I think, though it could be EMRO - always get them mixed up) are taking UPC to court over it, but they are holding strong, which is why I am happy to give them a few bob each month.

How much does that set you back a month?

fabbydabby

http://www.upc.ie/broadband/