How is Eircom, really?

Saga1

Apologies if this is in the wrong board. Feel free to skip the wall of text and go to the questions because that's really what I need clarification with.

So right now I'm with Magnet Fatpipe 100, and it is atrocious, of which it is extremely rarely brought up on this board for some strange reason. Not one week has gone by since last March without any problems, be it disconnecting every 30 minutes or so (Lasted every day until October). Permanent slow down to 2Mbps when it should be 100 from 8 PM to 12 AM (lasted until December) and right now there is severe packet loss since February, where the speeds are fine (well not really since I'm getting 70Mbps instead of 100Mbps) but the jitter is around 50ms per packet sent with about 10% packet loss in general resulting in everything being slowed to a crawl. I rang them up at February, as I always have with the problems and their attitude has always been "It'll be fixed within two weeks"..every week.

Not to mention their ****** router. My God, I've never had a piece of equipment so terrible and freedomless in my entire life. Every. Single. Setting does not work fully and any somewhat advanced features are completely locked down and to change that you need to be able to understand FreeBSD or Unix to be able to change settings with confidence, oh and to get root access you need to connect the 'hidden' serial port to your PC which is strange. I honestly could go on forever..

So I'm done with them now (thankfully there is no contract) but it raises the question to me whether all VDSL ISPs in Ireland, or at least my town are as bad as eachother? I ask this because all VDSL ISPs rent the cabinets from Eircom if I'm correct. So I'm wondering what ISP I should go to other than UPC because sadly it isn't available at my address. Eircom seems like the logical choice here because they own the cabinets, seem to be the largest ISP, I hear good things about them these days and especially the FTTH to 66 towns which is great, but there is also the 18 month contract I must engage with them in. And I don't want to do that if they are as bad as Magnet. So I just have general questions about them.

Is unlimited really unlimited? Can I download 1TB (obviously just an example, I don't go near that amount on a monthly basis) and not be warned?

Do they throttle; ~100/15Mbps always at all times of the day no matter what?

How is the default router; can I put it into bridge mode and attach my ASUS router to it? If not, do settings actually work, can I port forward, DMZ properly with it working 100%?

How is the uptime? Is there many disconnects?

Do they perform traffic shaping of any kind? Are any 'certain ' P2P applications or traffic limited?

Is there any suspicious policies? Something like that whole UPC fiasco with recording your data.

Is there any deceptive costs? assuming it says €45, that is all I will pay (it says router and implementation are free for me)

That's all really. I'm sorry for the long post and if this post comes across as a bit entitled, especially towards the poor souls who live in rural areas but I'm at my wits end with internet (especially when looking at what other countries have) and I just simply want internet that works, nothing more.

Thanks

dalta5billion

Have you ascertained whether you have a line fault or if it's on Magnet's end where the congestion lies?

We had months-long battles with Eircom to get them to upgrade their peerings (in which they played a hilarious game of "what saturated peering?"), but everything has miraculously resolved itself in the last few months, as evidenced by the massive dropoff in peaktime congestion complaints over on their various forums. The service is now excellent with Eircom, and I say that as someone who previously harassed them for months on end to do something.

Saga1

dalta5billion wrote: »

Have you ascertained whether you have a line fault or if it's on Magnet's end where the congestion lies?

Yeah it's certainly on their end, over the past year about 5 engineers were 'sent' and nothing ever came of it. And right now they said that the reason for packet loss is that too many people are using the same exchange so they must migrate people to different ones. This of course was on the 25th of February and they said it would only take a week, yet here we are.

Praetorian

In general, Magnet are terrible, Eircom / vodafone and UPC are excellent, (on their newer products).