North West Electronics/BlueBox

fooker!

H_A_L_9000 wrote: »

I made enquiries recently with OFCOM and was told that all Communications companies have to belong to an Alternative Dispute Resolution scheme who will if required take action against offending organisations, however this is not mandatory until 2015.

Bring on 2015 then!

fooker!

How is everyone finding their connection and speeds recently?

chris_ie

My speeds are up and down. Can drop to 2-3mb at times then 20mb at others, although mostly 8mb-10mb.

One issues I am seeing a lot of is packet loss. Are any others on here getting that? During off peak hours the loss goes to 0% but from about 9 in the morning it goes up, 2%-5% consistenly with high spikes intermittently. This causes issues for anything that needs a steady conenction, anyone gaming would notice issues.

To me it seems like the network cannot handle the load, or maybe there is a config issue somewhere. This is their internal network the loss is on, not an external. I have a system setup to monitor it daily. I've reported this but as yet have heard nothing other than "we have passed this to our senior engineer".

fooker!

chris_ie wrote: »

My speeds are up and down. Can drop to 2-3mb at times then 20mb at others, although mostly 8mb-10mb.

One issues I am seeing a lot of is packet loss. Are any others on here getting that? During off peak hours the loss goes to 0% but from about 9 in the morning it goes up, 2%-5% consistenly with high spikes intermittently. This causes issues for anything that needs a steady conenction, anyone gaming would notice issues.

To me it seems like the network cannot handle the load, or maybe there is a config issue somewhere. This is their internal network the loss is on, not an external. I have a system setup to monitor it daily. I've reported this but as yet have heard nothing other than "we have passed this to our senior engineer".

Yeah that is pretty much the same for me, but I get slightly more packet loss going by Pingtest.net, up to 9% at peak times till 1am, ping and jitter are high too, the worst I've recorded was a few days ago when both were regularly over 1000ms again using pingtest but maybe it is not as accurate as yours? As you say it’s not ideal for gaming!

I emailed them the other day about this and was told the following
“The package you signed up to offers 48/1 contention, the level of demand from users with multiple devices per home and in particular video applications is causing congestion at peak times and degrading performance, this is not a shortcoming of BlueBox as we continue exceed the bandwidth per user at the ratios we commit to, and are expanding the network all the time to improve capacity. We would ask that you remain patient as we implement our upgrades”

I emailed back to say that my contention ratio is meant to be 30-1! Not that it will make much difference I guess! These upgrades are a long time coming!

chris_ie

fooker! wrote: »

Yeah that is pretty much the same for me, but I get slightly more packet loss going by Pingtest.net, up to 9% at peak times till 1am, ping and jitter are high too, the worst I've recorded was a few days ago when both were regularly over 1000ms again using pingtest but maybe it is not as accurate as yours? As you say it’s not ideal for gaming!

I emailed them the other day about this and was told the following
“The package you signed up to offers 48/1 contention, the level of demand from users with multiple devices per home and in particular video applications is causing congestion at peak times and degrading performance, this is not a shortcoming of BlueBox as we continue exceed the bandwidth per user at the ratios we commit to, and are expanding the network all the time to improve capacity. We would ask that you remain patient as we implement our upgrades”

I emailed back to say that my contention ratio is meant to be 30-1! Not that it will make much difference I guess! These upgrades are a long time coming!

You should try a few traceroutes. That gives a better idea of where the issues are occurring. For my connection it goes to my local router then goes through 15 nodes before it even gets out of the NWE network on to the web. This is where I can see a lot of packet loss, within their own network. I have it sending 100 packets every 8 minutes or so through the day and all results are graphed.

I was told a while back that there were upgrades going on also. Although that phase should have been finished quite a while back! I've emailed them numerous times since start of April regarding latency and packet loss. Always been told it has been passed on to an engineer, or we are upgrading etc. Not once so far have I been given an explanation for it. The service quality has decreased since I joined a few years back. Back then I had issue with speed mostly but I ended up just accepting the fact it wasnt going to get better, if I get around 15mb I'm happy enough but there has been quite a few outages recently.

excollier

Yeah, I see also that it takes 15 hops to get to the public IP address of NWE, all private addresses before that. Then 7 hops to get to Google (8.8.8.8).
I have been with them for 8 years, mainly due to the fact that there is no other viable option - I live only 4 miles outside Letterkenny, only one mile from the nearest fibre VDSL cabinet.
Roll on (out) the fibre, please!

chris_ie

excollier wrote: »

Yeah, I see also that it takes 15 hops to get to the public IP address of NWE, all private addresses before that. Then 7 hops to get to Google (8.8.8.8).
I have been with them for 8 years, mainly due to the fact that there is no other viable option - I live only 4 miles outside Letterkenny, only one mile from the nearest fibre VDSL cabinet.
Roll on (out) the fibre, please!

Same as that. I'm about 5k from nearest fibre cabinet. Can't see us getting fiber for a long time, even the updated maps we're not included!

fooker!

Tried a few of them also and its the same for me!

chris_ie

10% packet loss tonight on top of a speed of about 3mb. Really annoying.

fooker!

Im getting between 2-3% and also high ping and jitter over 500 on each!

chris_ie

Thats pretty high! I've emailed them a few times but no reply.

fooker!

I've been emailing them the past few days about it but they just tried to fob me off by saying I should take the next generation package they have, when I asked them yesterday if they were trying to say that this would fix it they said...
"If you wish to have your equipment changed out to the Next Generation product then you will have the pleasure of experiencing some of, if not the fastest broadband speeds available anywhere in Ireland at the moment."

I emailed comreg for advice on Monday and they told me that if I didn't get resolution that they will contact them!
Ill see how it goes , ill try anything at this stage!

excollier

I have next-gen, still slow in the evening.

chris_ie

Yeah next gen here too.

fooker!

pings up and down but packet loss is now at 12-14%

chris_ie

fooker! wrote: »

pings up and down but packet loss is now at 12-14%

Yeah mine hasnt got any better. I had stopped my pings for a while must start them up again. Pretty poor that they dont seem to have an out of hours person. They should be getting alerts on these issues anyways.

pawddy

Sorry, I haven't been checking this thread recently because I've just given up. First emailed them about this problem at the start of January and it still isn't fixed, bit ridiculous isn't it? Just done three pingtests, with 8%, 10%, 13% packet loss. Ping around 150ms, and jitter around 100ms. I'm not sure about you but I think that's shocking. I can't watch anything on YouTube or Netflix, nor have I been able to play any sort of online game for the past year. Their customer service is the worst I've come across. I don't see a point in sending emails anymore because NWE decide to ignore them. Haven't a clue what's going on, but I cannot wait to get rid of this crap.

pawddy

Won't let me edit my above post to add this in, but the last time they came around to my house, they told me that I am the only person reporting these problems. Clearly not. What a shambles!

chris_ie

100ms is bad. Where are you pinging to? The address they told me to ping was 78.155.224.3. I was getting 5% loss and complained. They said he changed something and asked me to do a speed test (even though I didn't complain about speed). Since Friday or so now every evening from about 5 until around midnight I am getting a lot of loss around 10% and speeds around 3mb.

Haven't heard from them since last week. Every response seems straight out of a customer service document. "Please be advised" etc

pawddy

I've just been using pingtest.net. I also got a lot of 'Can you send us a speedtest?'. Annoying to say the least.

chris_ie

Ah right. You should try the following from command promp.

ping 8.8.8.8 -n 100

That will ping googles dns (usually reliable) 100 times and at the end should give you a summary or loss, average time etc. You could aslo try to the address I mentioned on here previously.

pawddy

Okay. To Google's DNS servers, I got an average of 35ms, and 12% packet loss.

To 78.155.224.3, I got an average of 8ms, and 14% packet loss.

Doesn't look good.

chris_ie

Yeah I'm getting quite a bit of loss aswell, around 10-15% between 5PM and midnight.

Tommy Lagahan

Same here lads. Speeds are semi acceptable (3-6Mb) at this time of night but the packet loss sure isn't.
Packet loss is actually far worse if you check with a CoD4 server and the lagometer, it shows a dropped packet at least once a second and sometimes several.

chris_ie

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Same here lads. Speeds are semi acceptable (3-6Mb) at this time of night but the packet loss sure isn't.
Packet loss is actually far worse if you check with a CoD4 server and the lagometer, it shows a dropped packet at least once a second and sometimes several.

I used to be able to get around 10-15mb during peak times. Now its less since last week. Packet loss is terrible. No confidence in them fixing it at the minute..

pawddy

Meh. My connections been like this for the past year now. Come 5pm and you have high ping, high jitter, and high packet loss. I've lost all faith in them to be honest. I'm with you Chris. They couldn't fix it when I first complained around January, so I don't think they'll be able to fix it any time soon.

Tommy Lagahan

pawddy wrote: »

Meh. My connections been like this for the past year now. Come 5pm and you have high ping, high jitter, and high packet loss. I've lost all faith in them to be honest. I'm with you Chris. They couldn't fix it when I first complained around January, so I don't think they'll be able to fix it any time soon.

Its probably some kind of load balancing / traffic shaping / QoS system they have going on utterly dieing trying to manage so much traffic at once.

chris_ie

Tommy Lagahan wrote: »

Its probably some kind of load balancing / traffic shaping / QoS system they have going on utterly dieing trying to manage so much traffic at once.

Yeah thats what I had thought also. I was told at one point that they didnt do any traffic shaping at all. I ran a few tests online that check for this which seemed to confirm this, but as you say it could be load balancing or the like. Interested to see what my update will be today...

pawddy

I was just thinking.. has anyone ever heard from this senior engineer they speak of?

Tommy Lagahan

Nope. Never got more than "its on our end, we're fixing it" every single time.