Slow broadband

blue5000

Like most people on here I live out rural, how slow is the net where you live? Can you upload/download photographs or open a pdf easily?

Heard on the radio this week about a guy testing how slow rural broadband in England is, this is what he did;

He used a video camera to make a 5 minute recording of himself having his haircut. He then uploaded it and emailed it to a friend 70 miles away in a rural area. At the same time he sent the memory card to the friend by CARRIER PIGEON.

By the time the carrier pigeon arrived, only half the video had been downloaded.

So, who is your provider, and how good/bad is it? I've just started with eircom which is better than previous provider, fwi. Even though the mast is less than a mile away the wireless was brutal. Some trees were in the way.

Eircom so far is ok, but there are dull moments too, I reckon its when the exchange is busy, but not sure really tbh.

whelan1

we have tried numerous broadband providers but eircom is the only one we can get broadband with so we will have to stick with them.... find it a massive improvement from the dial up... my parents live 100 yards from me and they have digiweb , its alot faster than eircom....After waiting for years to get broadband i got it in before last christmas and the first day we had it our pup bit through the wire for it , needless to say he got a swift kick in the butt and didnt go near it again:rolleyes:

reilig

I had o2 wireless up until a week ago. It was very hit and miss. Some days you would have a full signal and other days, nothing. It depended on the weather. You could have it plugged into the laptop and move into another room and it lost the signal.

I got a 3 wireless wifi modem last week. Its cheaper than o2 and now we are in the Rural Broadband area. Its very fast - much faster than the o2. You can watch videos from youtube or rte realplayer with no interruption. Its great for the skype too and we plan to run a wifi phone on skype over it. (At EUR 5.99 per month for unlimited European calls, you can't go wrong with it).

Its so far, so good for 3 anyway.

whelan1

i moved my mobile phone to 3 yesterday , had been with o2 for years but we have a rebounders for phone signal on our land and my da was doing a deal with vodafone and got me a phone. There was no coverage missed all my calls could only make calls upstairs in the bathroom :rolleyes: so vodafone let me out of my contract and i moved to 3 , so far so good

5live

Would that qualify as a wireless hotspot whelan1? Im with vodaphone. Only month but have probably lost coverage while writing this. I am looking at eircom as the local exchange just upgraded for broadband and only 2 years late so in reality it was ahead of schedule:D

snowman707

I am with IFA telecom and below is this morning's check test , doesn't exactly put the lines smoking, but is adequate for our needs, ( there are 2 wi fi running from the router also)

5live

Not sure how to measure but i know it takes 10 minutes to download a 10 mb song from itunes and i think thats way way slower than normal. An album can take a day to download with lost connections so am hoping a landline will improve the situation

dar31

using wicklow broadband, and have very little problems with it. very dear though e40 month for 5mb, but we manage to send the signal back out to two other houses as well. no other options available to us, as eircom dosent reach us and there is no signal for mobile broadband. 1gb film usually take between 2 -4 hrs, happy days. can watch most things in real time, bar the evenings when all the kids finish school, slows down for a few hours.

reilig

This is the speed test for the 3 broadband.


The O2 never had a download or upload speed of more than 1gb. Most days it was less than 0.5mb

bbam

We're with 3 mobile broadband
It's the ONLY provider where I am but it's too slow....

Mast congestion is our problem, I could have full signal but little or no download rate due to congestion, the most congested mast in the country according to one engineer :mad:

irishh_bob

broadband not available in any shape or form ( bar digiweb which is too expensive ) where i live , it takes me a half a minute to open a page on a thread , would take six months to download a youtube video

blue5000

I think if there was a prize for worst internet connection irish bob would win by a Gb.

Thanks for all the replies so far, I think it shows how difficult it would be to run any sort of business out in rural Ireland. My eircom is costing min 50e month which includes nationwide landline calls. They catch us on the mobile calls though, 24c for the first minute even if you're on for a few seconds.

FWI was 40e a month, I think they just overloaded the system with new ppl, it was ok when we got it in first, but recently it just got impossible to use.