UPC - Limerick - Gaming - Any Good ?

jonski

Hi ,

Girl called me from UPC to see if I would be interested in switching from Eircom for my BB . We are on the eircom ngb and have a very stable connection which is essential in this house as FPS are the order of the day . The girl was saying that there is no contention in my area so I wouldn't have to worry about what my neighbours are doing with their connection as it wouldn't interfere with mine .

The last I heard UPC was on a 48:1 contention ratio , is this gone ? and does anyone have any experience of their broadband in the limerick city region ?

jor el

Contention and congestion are often confused with each other, but often are. Contention of any value is not in itself a bad thing. Only when the ISP lacks the bandwidth for the customer base is there actually an issue, that people always put down to contention when it is in fact congestion.

My UPC 100M connection in Limerick just a moment ago:


If you're serious about gaming you'll already know not to use a Wifi connection, so make sure you stick with Ethernet.

jonski

Thanks for that

Just to push you a bit further and dig a bit deeper into your online time , would you say your connection is stable ? would you have any hesitation recommending it to someone for gaming ?

It's funny for me really because anytime I am asked I tell people that I think UPC is the best value for money BB in Limerick but I have't been brave enough to make the jump myself , I get very frustrated when I am playing online and my ping starts to jump around .

Champ

Hi,
I made the same decision a few years ago. I'm in Limerick and was on the Eircom 8MB home broadband package.

I moved to UPC because:
-On the high end packages Eircom used a default high interleaving setting which was awful for ping times (sometimes you could ask Eircom to lower this or downgrade to a lower speed package which didn't have the high interleaving).
-The Eircom BRASs in Limerick have had a particularly bad history for those few of us investigating a peculiar issue of packets going missing (obivously bad for gaming). To sum up a few of us in Limerick noted anything real time sensitive (from remote admining to gaming) wasn't performing well and traced the problem back to the Eircom BRASs. One or two of us actually got to speak to someone technically savy enough to understand and confirm the problem but the reply was there was no active plans to fix it, probably due to expense and possibly lack of users who were technical enough to explain the problem in sufficent numbers. Wonder if they even fixed it?

Anyways moved to UPC (phone service included) and am happy with the service. Only thing to watch out for is that you HAVE to use the UPC supplied gateway / modem combo to handle the connection and there is no functioning bridge mode (on any of the models that I'm aware of). You might think no biggie if it's got a decent firmware but sadly to be blunt it's a POS. Problems from DHCP stability, to wireless performance to limited config options... If your a regular on the broadband forums you probably noticed how many posts are about this. To sum up you should probably be prepared to setup your own router with the UPC hardware treating it as the DMZ but that's going off topic and plenty of info about that in the forums. Just remember to do some research on this and you'll save yourself some headaches in future troubleshooting.

I use it for gaming, it's stable and if there are any problems with the network in Limerick UPC tends to fix it within a day or two so far.

Not sure if contention ratios are actively applied to cable connections like they do to ADSL connections but basically you share the same "pipe" with everyone in your neighbourhood. Hasn't been an issue so far for me.

jonski

Last question before I head on over to the BB forums and find out that info about using a separate router .

The guy next door to me is on UPC BB and spend a fair bit of the day downloading .... does this affect my connection .