Mobile Broadband

Dougal.Maguire

can anyone recommend a good mobile broadband provider for the galway area? such as o2, vodafone, meteor, 3 etc. Which one of these has the best coverage and quick broadband connections?

its for a house in the gleann dara estate , if that makes a difference. Thanks!

RolandIRL

O2 are the cheapest at €9.99pm, with the once off charge of €20 for the modem. 10GB/month allowance. 12 month contract

Check different prices/allowances for Three and Meteor. No student deal for these two as fair as i know. Both billpay linked above, cheaper than prepay. Check to see if whatever plan you want has extra charges for the modem and what length contract it is

I wouldn't recommend Vodafone as they require you to pay an extra fee for VoIP and P2P services (Skype and torrents), which puts them off for me anyway.

O2 will have the most contention at peak times (more users online, slower speeds). Meteor/Three will likely have better speeds. Don't expect speeds of 7.2mbps as advertised. generally download speeds will be less than 1meg.

Online gaming (if you're interested) is a bit of a no-go. Lag will be a bitch, better to go with the likes of UPC for that.

i'm on O2 myself and find it grand. Good signal around Galway city, and at home (in sligo county). I get decent speeds for the likes of youtube (buffering can be a bit of an issue sometimes) and file-hosting sites (Rapidshare etc). get speeds around 400-500 kbps off them, not as good as on college wifi now.

Wouldn't use the mobile broadband for torrents though as it'll eat up your allowance. i think all of them provide an online counter to check your allowance. Keep an eye on it cos you don't want to go over and be charged 2c per MB/KB depending on your provider. 1GB will only do for browsing the internet and the odd youtube video. it's very limited, but depends on your price range, what you can afford.

Columc

mobile broadband is a terrible price, for such a bad connection and badnwith limit, I would suggest trying to get UPC or even BT out to the house and get a line just for the internet alone.

ciano1

Meteor had a student deal last year that was €9.99 a month for 10gb last year but has been taken down off their site since the start of the summer.
One year contract.

Unlike o2 broadband, the modem was free (Cost was €20 on o2)
I don't know whether or not it'll be back for this academic year but if it is, I'd say go for that over o2 or vodafone.

As far as speeds go, meteor has the lowest contention ratio due to it being a newer service than o2 or vodafone broadband so this should lead to it being faster than the other two.

As for online gaming, I have only tried it once with Call of Duty 4 for about 10 minutes and seemed to work perfectly with no lag.

Here's a speedtest I just done at home in Clonmel, although I always remember getting very similar speeds in Galway city!

Columc

ciano1 wrote: »

This on the mobile connection? not to bad if it is, they must of really improved the connection last time i checked!

RolandIRL

Columc wrote: »

mobile broadband is a terrible price, for such a bad connection and badnwith limit, I would suggest trying to get UPC or even BT out to the house and get a line just for the internet alone.

For me, mobile broadband suits my needs. Back home i only have dial-up (not even eircom bb is available) so i'd be without internet for the summer/weekends.

if you're just doing casual browsing (facebook, boards etc), there's not much point getting UPC for €32.75/month (lowest speed with no router or setup charges included). it's just overkill. i don't need UPC especially when i've got the college wifi for any heavy downloading i do.

btw just did a speedtest there. bear in mind this is out in the sticks in sligo where there's a crap signal compared to galway



I did a bit of online gaming with my brother in the netherlands last year (UT99), but the lag didn't encourage me to do it too much

BeerWolf

I'm using Digiweb's mobile broadband... and I'm seriously curious about this:

Even though I've got a 15GB cap, whenever I download something large [1gb or so]... suddenly the following day(s) my connection's bloody **** - does the ISP DELIBERATELY throttle my connection, even though I'm no where even remotely close to my cap ??

This ALWAYS fecking happens...!!