Experience with three broadband currently?

shortys94

Hi,

My parents live in Mayo and a three rep came to the house today offering the three broadband service. I was with my dad and we decided to try it for the 14 day period in which you can get a refund in. They currently have westnet, which has been pretty reliable with a speed of 1mbps download, 512 up, and a low latency, good for skype, movies, gaming etc, but its not great when more than one person is on the network

yet the rep was saying that we could expect speeds of at least 1.6mbps down, the hosue down the road was getting 6mbps.

Im just wondering what everyones current experiences are now with the broadband service, is it reliable? I dotn want to sign up for the 18 month contract to find that it gradually becomes less reliable and drops off from time to time..... they havent received the equipment yet so havent had chance to try it out before deciding, Im just wondering is it a reliable service for your main internet in the house

Thanks

Sponge Bob

shortys94 wrote: »

I dotn want to sign up for the 18 month contract to find that it gradually becomes less reliable and drops off from time to time..... they havent received the equipment yet so havent had chance to try it out before deciding, Im just wondering is it a reliable service for your main internet in the house

Apart from the fact that you cannot game on it and generally cannot ping in under 100ms ....where Westnet is nearer 15ms .....it is usually grand for the first 14 days.

Then the reps come back and sell more product on the same mast :cool:

downwithpeace

Did the Three rep say the house down the road was getting the 6MB or have you seen this for yourself?
Either way that 6MB won't be constant and the more people who go with Three will only make the area more congested and slow the whole thing down. I can get 4-4.5MB in the early hours, 1-2MB during the day and good browsing speeds during busy times of the day but it can be extremely slow at times with disconnections happening when the network (My area) is under load.
Three is my only choice bar dial up so if Westnet is providing you a good service at a good price then why change, remember if it's only for faster downloads then Three is limited to 30GB and going over is not advisable.

watty

Speed is 0.05Mbps to 7Mbps on Mobile. They can't control it.
Latency is 80ms to 2000ms. They can't control it.

Both those can change dramatically over seconds, minutes and gradually get worse on average over months.

Westnet @1Mbps is superior to Mobile @6Mbps.
See http://www.techtir.ie/comms/mobile-vs-fixed

bealtine

shortys94 wrote: »

They currently have westnet, which has been pretty reliable with a speed of 1mbps download, 512 up, and a low latency, good for skype, movies, gaming etc, but its not great when more than one person is on the network

Why give up a perfectly good service for an unreliable 3G solution? 3G will never be broadband no matter what some "guy up the road" is alleged to get.
Also the more users that sign up the worse the service will become.

You did the right thing in asking first before signing up to a contract imho.

siblers

Ive had three for about 2 weeks now and my speed has been quicker than my eircom 2meg line since I've had three, gaming has been more or less the same too, having said that it does randomly cut out at any given interval (unlike eircom). It's kinda impossible to compare three for one person to the next as it's totally unique to your given location. If you're happy with your current set up then you'd probably be better of keeping it, slower speeds with a more stable connection is better than higher speeds on a unstable connection (except in the case of pyscho expensive eircom)