UPC (Virgin) vs Free

sqdz

Hello,

I want to talk about the difference between two ISPs. UPC/Virgin (Ireland) and Free (France).

I find this operator is very useless, when I see the number of IT companies in Dublin.

I'm not there to shout "France is the best" (We has some bad ISP like SFR), but only to show you the UPC/Virgin delay... and that puts us deep well ...

This comes from my personal experience, after 6 months with UPC and 3 year with free.

http / imgur.com / R9E3aVr

I have put spaces in the URL , because I have a restriction.

Maybe I will try the experiment with another ISP. What about to Sky ?

What do you think about UPC ? You encounter the same problems ?

What's your experience in other countries ISP ?

ThisRegard

You're a bit sketchy on what your problem is. But as for UPC/Virgin, I've found them good and never had any issues with them.

bk

In fairness, Free is probably one of the very best ISP's in the entire world! Even up there with Google Fiber.

This is a company who builds their own routers and media servers from the ground up with their own version of Linux!!! They also allow geeks a high degree of access to their service.

This is an incredibly geeky, forward looking, disruptive and innovative company.

I wish Free operated in Ireland but unfortunately they don't.

UPC/Virgin aren't as innovative or exciting as Free. However they are by far the best ISP in Ireland and way ahead of any other ISP in Ireland. There are also one of the better ISP's across Europe and they have definitely heavily invested in the Irish market, innovated and vastly improved things here.

If you let us know specifically what problems you have had, maybe we can help?

sqdz

Sometimes I have a ping spikes in game. example : yersterday 3 times during 5min in 2hours. That makes some lags (A large packet loss with a UDP protocol...).

My flatemate has the same problem with an ethernet connexion.

I have already change my modem. I think the problem is more related to our apartment.

I don't think the technician will do something effective.

+1 bk ;-)

Free has worked with companies in America ... all is not lost ..

ED E

Bridge your modem, seriously.

Nollog

There's not as much competition here as in France.

Your choices here are up to 100mbit/s with the several open eir resellers, or twice the speed and more with upc/virgin media.
...alongside the mobile phone internet, I guess.

By next year Virgin will have some decent competition with SIRO and eir ultra mega hyper global.

sqdz

@ED_E : I think it's not a good solution, because the problem come the cable of appartment. Although the modem sucks, the problem is elsewhere.

@/\/ollog : Exactly, in my opinion UPC has the "monopoly" in Irland which explains their delays.

bk

sqdz wrote: »

@/\/ollog : Exactly, in my opinion UPC has the "monopoly" in Irland which explains their delays.

Not really, Eir are the ones with the monopoly. They started out at the government owned national telephone company similar to France Telecom/Orange in France.

Eir owns almost 100% of all phone lines in Ireland, companies like Sky and Vodafone simply resell their service.

UPC developed out of the cable TV network that were largely privately built. UPC bought up the old cable companies and then invested 500 million in the cable network, introducing fantastic high speed broadband to Ireland. As a result finally breaking Eir's monopoly. Unfortunately UPC is only available to about 40% of Irish homes, so Eir still very much has a monopoly for most of Ireland.

I've a Sam Knows box attached to my UPC router, constantly measuring performance and the results are outstanding. It reports high speed and low variability.

So it sounds like your issue is unique to your apartment (perhaps the wiring is old), rather then a widespread indication of their performance.