North West Electronics/BlueBox

chris_ie

Yeah its to be expected that peak time will perform less that non-peak. I think its bad form though overloading. If they have hit the capacity on their node/hub or whatever then dont take on anymore customers on that node or else, as you say, add more hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if they got greedy and just kept adding customers. They should be reinvesting in their network.

They were doing upgrades not that long ago. Strangely enough, before that my connection wasn't that bad. So after upgrading its got worse.

ShowMeTheCash

Mine was completely off there from Saturday afternoon and came back on Sunday night.

It could be greed but I am going to say more along the lines of inexperienced!

I am not sure what they are pitching anymore, saying speeds up to 50Mb but only if the 200 people within your cluster are offline is missleading and they could run into hot water over that.

At the moment I am seeing speeds of under 1Mb at times which is breaking their contractual obligation.

Unfortunately I have little other options in my area, quinn sat I think are the only other provider.

chris_ie

ShowMeTheCash wrote: »

Mine was completely off there from Saturday afternoon and came back on Sunday night.

It could be greed but I am going to say more along the lines of inexperienced!

I am not sure what they are pitching anymore, saying speeds up to 50Mb but only if the 200 people within your cluster are offline is missleading and they could run into hot water over that.

At the moment I am seeing speeds of under 1Mb at times which is breaking their contractual obligation.

Unfortunately I have little other options in my area, quinn sat I think are the only other provider.

My connection didnt go down at the weekend but it was poor. In the same boat with regards to other options. At times my 3G connection is faster than the broadband. But other than that no other choice. If they had a bit of competition they'd need to up their game, but I suppose thats the reason they exist, because of there being no options for people in rural areas.

Fair play to them. Its great that they are providing a service where others wont, but they need to make sure the service works and lives up to what people are paying. Or else drop their advertised speeds and drop the prices as they can't live up to it. Speeds dropping at peak time is one thing, dropping packets at a hight rate is another. Hopefully this new national broadband plan will be alot better this time around and we'll get some decent broadband options.

ShowMeTheCash

chris_ie wrote: »

My connection didnt go down at the weekend but it was poor. In the same boat with regards to other options. At times my 3G connection is faster than the broadband. But other than that no other choice. If they had a bit of competition they'd need to up their game, but I suppose thats the reason they exist, because of there being no options for people in rural areas.

Fair play to them. Its great that they are providing a service where others wont, but they need to make sure the service works and lives up to what people are paying. Or else drop their advertised speeds and drop the prices as they can't live up to it. Speeds dropping at peak time is one thing, dropping packets at a hight rate is another. Hopefully this new national broadband plan will be alot better this time around and we'll get some decent broadband options.

The national BB plan I don't expect to see anything out with me any times soon.

I remember asking eircom about BB a few years back, they told me never!

chris_ie

ShowMeTheCash wrote: »

The national BB plan I don't expect to see anything out with me any times soon.

I remember asking eircom about BB a few years back, they told me never!

Ha! Nice Have you checked out the new map? Apparently where I am its says due to start 2016 I think, and be available to 100% of the houses in the area. I think they messed up last time with the 3 option so hopefully dont want to do that again. And eircom's proposal for the NBP was pretty good.

chris_ie

Bit of a surprise when I landed home yesterday. I had 4G on the phone. Did a speed test last night then to compare.

NWE : 4.78 down, 8.90 up (To their own speed test server in Derry - first image)
3 4G : 8.73 down, 14.40 up (To Dublin - second image)

Note : I did end up eventually getting around 8 down on NWE a short while later.

fooker!

what is the 3 broadband like for playing online? I have a mast pretty close to me!

Tommy Lagahan

fooker! wrote: »

what is the 3 broadband like for playing online? I have a mast pretty close to me!

Outside of the odd ping jitter every few seconds its better than the NWE for me at peak hours. Pings much better since HSUPA 3G became standard, around 50ms to Google, average 80ms on CS:GO matchmaking servers (too high for my liking, fine for CoD or casual play) Only the odd second or third day its just as bad as NWE but it HEAVILY depends on the contention in your area. Most people in my area switched from NBS Three connections to NWE so the contention has simply moved from one service to the other lol.
4G now, it has serious potential to kick NWE into some damn action. If I can show them my phone getting better speeds I'm pretty sure they're gonna have to do something.

chris_ie wrote: »

Bit of a surprise when I landed home yesterday. I had 4G on the phone. Did a speed test last night then to compare.

NWE : 4.78 down, 8.90 up (To their own speed test server in Derry - first image)
3 4G : 8.73 down, 14.40 up (To Dublin - second image)

Note : I did end up eventually getting around 8 down on NWE a short while later.

Whereabouts in Donegal are you Chris if ya don't mind me askin? I'll be having a 4G Mifi modem to use this old Three sim card with for gaming if I can get speeds like that outside Donegal Town. Keeping the NWE for its lack of bandwidth caps but gaming's utter dung on it when me mates all want to be on at peak hours.

fooker!

I'm going to get a lend of a friends one to try it out, anything is got to be better than what I have, I done a few ping tests earlier and got 52-56% packet loss... I mean seriously what the hell!?

one question though is the NAT the same as with NWE? as in always strict? I find that can be a pain when trying to play with others

Tommy Lagahan

fooker! wrote: »

I'm going to get a lend of a friends one to try it out, anything is got to be better than what I have, I done a few ping tests earlier and got 52-56% packet loss... I mean seriously what the hell!?

one question though is the NAT the same as with NWE? as in always strict? I find that can be a pain when trying to play with others

Nah its open provided you use the right APN, I think its 3internet.
You can get open NAT with NWE too but aye the packet loss is ass so there's no point for gaming.

chris_ie

I've never tried the 3G for gaming. I'm just outside Letterkenny Tommy, the Three site had Letterkenny on the 'coming soon' list but took it off. Not all places are listed. If you check the coverage map for 4G it shows live down around Cardonagh and Ardara I think. Speeds are pretty good on it again this evening.

I have an open NAT on NWE, took alot of messing about and trying different router firmwares (Tomato etc). Eventually got it open. Not sure if something happened there end or I got it sorted. I reset everything recently and got it open again after sorting port forwarding. Just a note, some ea games are hindered by uPnp for some reason. So if you have that on and dont need it or other devices dont might be worth turning off and seeing if it improves.

I used to have a decent gaming experience gaming on NWE until the start of this year. Really bad since.


Another speed check, again NWE test done using their own server (i.e. not onto the web). 3 using theirs in Dublin.

NWE :


3 4G:

fooker!

I'm not too clued up on setting up routers and port forwarding, would there be any guides or reading you both could suggest id like to get mine open! I haven't got a great router though, a netgear wnr2000

ill try the uPnp thing though!

thebo

Does everyone use the NWE dns servers or do some use the google or opendns servers instead. just wonderin if the google or opendns offer quicker page fetching than NWE own dns.

chris_ie

thebo wrote: »

Does everyone use the NWE dns servers or do some use the google or opendns servers instead. just wonderin if the google or opendns offer quicker page fetching than NWE own dns.

I've tried alternatives. I ran a tool that tests you current one and alternatives and I think there wasn't much difference between NWE's and Google's, NWE just edging it I think.

chris_ie

fooker! wrote: »

I'm not too clued up on setting up routers and port forwarding, would there be any guides or reading you both could suggest id like to get mine open! I haven't got a great router though, a netgear wnr2000

ill try the uPnp thing though!

Check out portforward.com Is it xbox?

Edit : http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/Netgear/WNR2000/

Tommy Lagahan

I had to call them up about getting NAT 2, they said they had to put me on a static IP address to get the proper NAT setup on their end so I'm paying 4 quid a month extra for that.

chris_ie

I used ea servers to test in the past. I was getting loss outside the network and was told as it was outside it wasnt their issue, more or less, and that packets are dropped.

Now see below. Latency is a bit higher but quite a difference in packet loss. The <edit> parts are just the ips in their own (NWE or Three) network.

Destination node, 1% loss with Three and 8% loss with NWE (Out of 100 packets). Alot of other nodes have quite a bit of loss though.

Three 4G :



NWE :


Both are using gtt.net, yet Three has the better performance (i.e less packet loss, although higher latency). So either NWE need to sort it, or they need to get in contact with gtt and sort it.

NIMAN

ShowMeTheCash wrote: »

In fairness it is not the technology, fiber or fixed wireless the same issue can arise.
NWE are a small outfit that by the looks of it are not scaling well with increased numbers.

If you have 100 users with fiber all contected to the same hub and 100 Fixed wireless users connected to a similar hub they will be the same.

Each hub will only be able to handle a certain amount of users before you need a second hub etc....
You overload the hub then the their is only so much capacity it can handle. This is why it is fine during the day when most people are at work and kids are at school, then come 5 o'clock youtube and netflix are in full swing it begins to slow up...

afaik, they are a decent setup, but BB is a small part of their business.
They tend to work on bigger transmitter jobs, installs etc.
BB is a by-product of their business I think.

fooker!

chris_ie wrote: »

Check out portforward.com Is it xbox?

no ps3, ill give that a read tomorrow!,

Tommy Lagahan

Three for reference:

Never thought I'd see the day that the NBS system would be faster than something.
My patience is growing thin now alright. This is off peak hours on a fecking Friday afternoon.

chris_ie

Ha, yeah I had the same one evening. Broadband slowed right down so I decieded to try the 3G on the phone, it was faster. I haven't heard from them now in a few days, was told I would but again, nothing.

chris_ie

I put on the Xbox there. The network tests always show 6-10% packet loss and download of about 7mb via NWE. I put the hotspot on the iphone and connected the Xbox to the 4G connection via the iPhone. Result was 0% packet loss and 9mb down.

pawddy

I've actually been tethering my 3G to play games for quite a while, the packet loss you get with NWE is shocking. And to whoever was talking about open NAT, yeah I also pay an extra £4 a month.. for something that should be free and is the standard with almost every other provider.

fooker!

it would sicken me to have to pay them another 4 euro the way things are! wouldn't mind if it was working all the time!

chris_ie

Are you guys getting packet loss via a similar route to what I had in one of my previous posts? (via gtt.net)

Tommy Lagahan

chris_ie wrote: »

Are you guys getting packet loss via a similar route to what I had in one of my previous posts? (via gtt.net)

I'm getting packet loss to all networks including NWE internal, I can ping an address for ya here though and check, which do I ping?

chris_ie

Do a traceroute to one of the external IP's you were pinging to. Just curious to see if its the same.

Tommy Lagahan

I'm on a static IP so I blanked out the IPs for my connection, the routing might be slightly different on static too because I had to get it to get NAT 2.

11 Hops within their network:

chris_ie

Ah right. That actually looks alright. Suppose it off peak yet aswell. UOTrace is useful for tests or PingPlotter (Enter IP, it runs a trace route then polls each instance to check for loss). Thats what I used above. I think they raised my issue with their provider, I hope. After all if their service is suffering as a result of something they're connected to they should be complaining.

Tommy Lagahan

chris_ie wrote: »

Ah right. That actually looks alright. Suppose it off peak yet aswell. UOTrace is useful for tests (Enter IP, it runs a trace route then polls each instance to check for loss). Thats what I used above. I think they raised my issue with their provider, I hope. After all if their service is suffering as a result of something they're connected to they should be complaining.

Didn't know about UOTrace! Well handy wee program this, will do the same tracert to google on it and see what kind of loss I get to all the IPs on route. Will edit this whenever it tests 100 packets.
Edit: whoops let it go over 100, anyway definitely off peak here as its actually working. Be a different story in 3 hours.

Host Name                        IP Address        Hop    Ping Time   Ping Avg   % Loss    Pkts r/s   Ping best/worst
my.router                        192.168.2.1      1      0ms         0ms        0%        126 / 126  0ms / 2ms
* Unknown Host *                 <snip>		  2      0ms         0ms        0%        126 / 126  0ms / 3ms
* Unknown Host *                 <snip>		  3      2ms         2ms        0%        126 / 126  1ms / 15ms
* Unknown Host *                 10.108.1.1        4      6ms         4ms        0%        126 / 126  1ms / 25ms
* Unknown Host *                 10.100.7.1        5      5ms                    100%      0 / 126
* Unknown Host *                 10.100.6.1        6      6ms                    100%      0 / 126
* Unknown Host *                 10.100.11.1       7      7ms                    100%      0 / 125
* Unknown Host *                 10.100.50.1       8      4ms                    100%      0 / 125
* Unknown Host *                 10.100.99.1       9      4ms                    100%      0 / 125
* Unknown Host *                 10.150.254.1      10     3ms         4ms        0%        125 / 125  3ms / 20ms
* Unknown Host *                 10.150.254.254    11     10ms        4ms        0%        125 / 125  2ms / 17ms
cust<snip>.nwewn.com             <snip>		   12     3ms         4ms        0%        125 / 125  3ms / 12ms
* Unknown Host *                 195.66.224.125    13     20ms        18ms       0%        125 / 125  16ms / 29ms
* Unknown Host *                 209.85.245.110    14     31ms        23ms       0%        125 / 125  17ms / 44ms
* Unknown Host *                 72.14.238.21      15     19ms                   100%      0 / 125
lhr14s23-in-f31.1e100.net        74.125.230.95     16     18ms        18ms       0%        124 / 125  17ms / 45ms (google.ie)