Quality of Eir Fibre 100mb & Future Upgrades?

ixus

I'm currently on virgin 240mb. I rely on it's robustness (to date) and high speed capabilities, if not using it to the max.

I may be moving to a location that virgin doesn't support. If Eir max 100mb is my option, how robust is this during daily usage? This is in terms of true speed, outages etc. Is it a case of only getting 60mb with poor quality during busy parts of the day?

Anyone know if there are plans to boost in similar way virgin have? Am in Maynooth area if this helps on supplying info.

Any feedback/further information would be appreciated.

Gonzo

you will get anywhere from 7meg to 100meg depending on how far you are from the cabinet. If you are moving to a housing estate you should get 40meg+ and if lucky you could get 70+ if your very close to a cabinet. I cant get fibre myself but from what I hear its reliable enough, certainly more reliable than old ADSL but it will be quite a step down from what your used to on Virgin Media.

ED E

Reliability is good with FTTC. All cabs have a battery bank that supports them for about 6hrs so even if theres a localized ESB fault they'll stay up.

As above speed is a product of location. If you're on a main road in the north west side you may end up being direct fed which can mean a lot lower speeds. The NGA network itself is overbuilt for future reliability but access level speeds wont be periodically increased like with Virgin. A few areas are in line for 30Mbps boosts from up to 70 to up to 100.

ixus

Thanks for replies. MNT1_007 on the Rathcoffey/Newtown Rd is the nearest live one. On map, less than 100m as crow flies, prob about 3/400m via road/pathway (estate).

Checked with potential neighbour there and getting just shy of 70meg with vodafone through eircom.

Would there be serious drops in the evening due to peak usage with Eir? I remote into my office workspace often. Wondering what kind of latency issues I could encounter. I have no issues to the naked eye with Virgin (similar when I had 120 meg).

ED E

Nope, you won't see any congestion. There's ample bandwidth in NGA unlike the old legacy networks.

ixus

Thanks, really appreciate the rapid response.

dalta5billion

You will see both domestic and international congestion with Eir and (reportedly) other operators at peak times - this is a reality of peering, by my estimation Eircom has a maximum of 40 Gbps capacity to/from INEX (for national traffic - that takes just 40 FTTH users to max out, in an absolute worst case scenario). In practical terms however it's congestion per TCP connection, so you won't notice it if you have multiple users on your home network with separate streams. The problem is that in the past Eir have let it get so bad that a single TCP connection with a host on an INEX-connected network might only ever reach a downstream rate of 2 Mbps at peak times, even though the full 100 Mbps from your VDSL2 router to the NGA handover point might be available. So multithreaded download managers become the only way to achieve reasonable speeds and watch your TV shows. It also means that your UDP-based Skype calls etc. go to **** at peak time due to heavy packet loss.

Thankfully things have been fairly steady recently for me at least - it appears to vary by the region you are in, which makes me suspect some parts of the NGA network can suffer from congestion at peak times as well. ED E - can you confirm what metric is used to ensure the NGA network is over-provisioned?

ED E

You have to separate discussion somewhat. There's traditional access level contention/congestion and then there's the limitation of transit.

The FTTC cabs have 20Gb back to the aggregation in the exchange, estimating an average line rate of 50Mb then you need 400 lines running full tilt to max it out. Maybe 390 if you account for multicast. But thats never ever going to happen.

INEX really has nothing to do with things, check their traffic stats, they never congest. Eir directly peer with many other nets Co-Loing in citywest anyways.

The part that does congest, for everyone, is international transit. There are six links out from Ireland of which each provider uses a couple. Virgin have recently being playing cheapskate with L3 and slowing stuff in Holland, twice in recent memory Vodafones link from Wexford has failed and caused congestion for Eir and themselves. This situation is more about rates paid than the technology present so its not a fixed issue like access level stuff. There's no guarantee once you leave the ISP network unless you purchase a leased line to London/Paris for insane figures monthly.

ixus

My company would have those leased lines so I would remote into the office desk. Would be mainly graphics (a lot of them) coming into home.

Any info on the FTTH and timeline for 1Gig to hit Maynooth? 6-12 months or years? How has it performed in test locations?

Was onto Eir trying to get as much info as possible but it is difficult.

ED E

Maynooth is well serviced already, unless SIRO try and eat that customer base it will be way down eirs lists. You might as well ignore its existence for now.

dalta5billion

ED E wrote: »

You have to separate discussion somewhat. There's traditional access level contention/congestion and then there's the limitation of transit.

The FTTC cabs have 20Gb back to the aggregation in the exchange, estimating an average line rate of 50Mb then you need 400 lines running full tilt to max it out. Maybe 390 if you account for multicast. But thats never ever going to happen.

INEX really has nothing to do with things, check their traffic stats, they never congest. Eir directly peer with many other nets Co-Loing in citywest anyways.

The part that does congest, for everyone, is international transit. There are six links out from Ireland of which each provider uses a couple. Virgin have recently being playing cheapskate with L3 and slowing stuff in Holland, twice in recent memory Vodafones link from Wexford has failed and caused congestion for Eir and themselves. This situation is more about rates paid than the technology present so its not a fixed issue like access level stuff. There's no guarantee once you leave the ISP network unless you purchase a leased line to London/Paris for insane figures monthly.

The OP asked about real world speeds, so the quality of Eir's transit and peerings are essential information.

You can have congestion "at INEX" as it appears to an Eir customer -(i.e. downloading anything from a direct INEX peer) caused by Eircom maxing out their ports at INEX or having some bottleneck between Eircom's network and their infrastructure to/from their presence at INEX . At one time you could get 9 MB/s down from any network connected to one of the INEX routers (e.g. the Digiweb speed test server) and 56 KB/s from any network connected to the other INEX router (e.g. Blacknight speed test server). Eircom admitted this on a thread way back when we the customers kicked up a fuss about it.

ISP's are responsible for making sure their ports at international exchanges are not congested. After that, it is the responsibility of Netflix et. al to peer at the major international exchanges. (Although you can argue forever about whether it should be the responsibility of the residential ISPs or the CDN's to build out presence to international exchanges to enable better experiences for the end customer).

Thankfully things *have* improved a lot since with Eir - it's been reasonable for almost a year. I do fear that they won't have planned their peering and transit properly for all the 1 Gbps FTTH customers though.

Some_Person

I might have experienced this last night on Magnet Business VDSL, latency was always fine at 8ms but couldn't seem to squeeze any more than about 30meg, but got full speeds when speedtesting with Magnets internal speedtest. Will test more to know for sure.

12Phase

I moved from Eir Fibre (VDSL) to Sky and to be honest the service is poor in comparison and it's all about onwards connectivity / peering.

On Eir I could easily stream 4K video on YouTube. On Sky it's buffering all over the place.

There's been no change from the modem to the fibre cabinet and the sync speed with the Sky Q Hub is actually slightly better than with the F1000, but the Sky/BT network is no where near as good.

Regretting the move now.

Eir is actually a very well peered and well managed network. The only issue you'll have is if you can't get decent speed from FTTC cabinet to your house. If you can, it's a very solid network.

ixus

So Eir announced they are going 1Gig to 410 houses in Maynooth today as part of new rollout. Anywhere I can find exact locations?

The 70meg just isn't enough for my work requirements.

While I got some great information on here, I spent an hour talking to various departments and on hold to Eir trying to find information about future rollouts. Couldn't give any information and wouldn't supply me with someone up the chain who could. Very frustrating as I pulled out of a house purchase because of this, I just couldn't take the risk.

red_bairn

ixus wrote: »

So Eir announced they are going 1Gig to 410 houses in Maynooth today as part of new rollout. Anywhere I can find exact locations?

The 70meg just isn't enough for my work requirements.

While I got some great information on here, I spent an hour talking to various departments and on hold to Eir trying to find information about future rollouts. Couldn't give any information and wouldn't supply me with someone up the chain who could. Very frustrating as I pulled out of a house purchase because of this, I just couldn't take the risk.

Grab an engineer who is rolling about in an Open Eir van.

ItHurtsWhenIP

ixus wrote: »

So Eir announced they are going 1Gig to 410 houses in Maynooth today as part of new rollout. Anywhere I can find exact locations?

The 70meg just isn't enough for my work requirements.

While I got some great information on here, I spent an hour talking to various departments and on hold to Eir trying to find information about future rollouts. Couldn't give any information and wouldn't supply me with someone up the chain who could. Very frustrating as I pulled out of a house purchase because of this, I just couldn't take the risk.

eir aren't responsible for the infrastructure, just the services that run on it. Open eir are the people that are responsible and who would know where the planned locations are, but they won't deal with the public - only other telcos.

If 70Mbps is not adequate for your needs, then your best bet (for the short term) is to look for an area already served by Virgin Media. Either that or wait for the FTTH roll out to be more widely available (say 12-18 months).

ixus

And that's what I'm doing and always had planned. See my previous posts.

You can't overlook the irony of spending a period of time investigating this with Eir to no avail, and to announce 3 days later, said measures which would have been useful information. To add, just found out house went sale agreed today too.

It's ok, I can laugh about it.

ED E

ixus wrote: »

And that's what I'm doing and always had planned. See my previous posts.

You can't overlook the irony of spending a period of time investigating this with Eir to no avail, and to announce 3 days later, said measures which would have been useful information. To add, just found out house went sale agreed today too.

It's ok, I can laugh about it.

Its a regulated product, if there's an announce date they have to tell the other telcos one month previous to availability(usually going public too). Front line staff won't know jack until they release the plans, its how the system works.


If 70Mb isnt enough you should have your company pay for a corporate segment FTTB connection.

Some_Person

ED E wrote: »

The FTTC cabs have 20Gb back to the aggregation in the exchange,

Did they build every cabinet with 20Gb back to the exchange or just the heavily loaded ones?

Meanwhile I'm still experiencing some congestion on Magnet Business VDSL, could only get 3 meg speed on a Heanet FTP download tonight.

Will have to get onto Magnet again but it looks like peering congestion.

ED E

The service unit from Huawei comes with two 10Gb UL ports, both of these appear to be used.

Magnet f'ck with FTP, was that definitely an FTP connection as most people access their mirrors through HTTP?

Some_Person

Yes I was downloading from ftp.heanet.ie
supposedly they don't interfere with FTP.

I get full speeds at non peak time though.

Similar results with speedtest.net servers, approx 9 megs to Cork Internet Exchange, approx 25 megs to a US server that I test with.
Near full speeds to Eir, full to internal Magnet speedtest.

All clears up past peak times.

ED E

Sounds like Magnet may have insufficient bandwidth after the L2TP handoff point.

The FTP shaping has always been unclear, they've said they havent for a while now but users have displayed clear signs that shaping is in effect.

Some_Person

Digging this up again, didn't get to talk to Magnet about this since but I will tomorrow.

Tonight I notice higher than usual latency, usually its 11ms to Google DNS but tonight its around 30ms.

It's actually 30ms to the first hop which is Magnets PPPoE concentrator.

Is it safe to assume there can't be any congestion at the cab since its supposed to be fed with 20Gb?

12Phase

In general the FTTC network is very good. I've had no issues with bandwidth or anything else on it.
We're about 700m from the cabinet and get over 70mbit/s

It will depend on the type of copper wiring used (diameter of the cables) and so on. But, in general the service is anywhere between about 40 and 100mbit/s. Due to the nature of the technology it drops off quite quickly the further you get from the cabinet though.

In terms of future developments, full fibre to home is being rolled out over the next few years and the FTTC cabinets are likely to form the basis of it. Eir have pre-installed a lot of spare fibre capacity to each cabinet and will eventually be offering full gigabit service. I wouldn't be holding my breath though as it could take a few years yet for them to reach everyone with that kind of service. It is rolled out already in a few areas though.

ED E

Some_Person wrote: »

Digging this up again, didn't get to talk to Magnet about this since but I will tomorrow.

Tonight I notice higher than usual latency, usually its 11ms to Google DNS but tonight its around 30ms.

It's actually 30ms to the first hop which is Magnets PPPoE concentrator.

Is it safe to assume there can't be any congestion at the cab since its supposed to be fed with 20Gb?

It shouldn't be, but if its out of the ordinary you could find OpenEir has a had a transmission failure on a link and traffic is routing around it, with encapsulation you can never tell.