Eir BB - congestion free?

tombrown

I switched from eircom to Sky for Phone & BB a few years ago. I am on DSL (not fibre) and typically get ~8mbps.

Since I switched I have had a few visits from eir sales folks trying to get me to switch back & one of the advantages they use is that eir offer congestion free broadband, but I never did as any degradation in service I noticed at busy times was minimal (maybe down to 6mbps at worst)

However recently I have started to see degradation in the evenings & at weekends to as low as 1mbps; I contacted Sky and they said they do not offer a congestion free service.

Now my quesiton - was the eir claim of "congestion free" real or pure marketing BS? I am sure it is possible to configure DSLAMs (or VLANs) to offer that level of service, I just dont know if they actually do that

degsie

tombrown

Thank you

That is why I asked the question, but if you think asking a quesiton makes me a sucker so be it. This has been helpful

bk

tombrown wrote: »

Thank you

That is why I asked the question, but if you think asking a quesiton makes me a sucker so be it. This has been helpful

I don't think degsie was suggesting that you are a sucker at all. The fact that you asked the question clearly shows that you aren't. Not everyone can be an expert in every area, which is why boards exists.

Rather I think he was just making the point that all door to door sales people lie pretty much constantly and their whole reason for being is to trick less well informed people into buying their product.

tombrown

OK - i'll unruffle my feathers

But I am interested in whether this particular salesman was giving me BS or if such a service is feasible. I can ask Eir themselves, but may get the "sucker" treatment

tsue921i8wljb3

tombrown wrote: »

OK - i'll unruffle my feathers

But I am interested in whether this particular salesman was giving me BS or if such a service is feasible. I can ask Eir themselves, but may get the "sucker" treatment

Yes it is BS. All residential broadband connections are contended (shared with others) to some extent.

Kristopherus

tombrown wrote: »

OK - i'll unruffle my feathers

But I am interested in whether this particular salesman was giving me BS or if such a service is feasible. I can ask Eir themselves, but may get the "sucker" treatment

Unless he can confirm that they can provide BB via a fibre cable, then he was fibbing through his teeth to you.

loyatemu

there's a difference between contention and congestion. Contention is a simple ratio - how many users are sharing how much bandwidth. Congestion is a possible result of contention, if everyone uses all their bandwidth at the same time, there will be congestion.

Eir's network is contended, to guarantee that it was congestion free they would have to ensure that backhaul links (from the exchange) are upgraded automatically once traffic hits a certain level (using whatever metrics they choose to use). They would have to guarantee that your connection never dropped below the sync speed of your line (8 Mb/s in your case). Once your in a contract with them it could be difficult to hold them to this.

Virgin offer something similar (i.e. if you have 240Mb connection, you should be able to get at last 180Mb at peak times), but I don't know if it's an actual guarantee.

ED E

If you want to be technical, there is a variation.

Assuming a modern area (the old ones are a tiny minority) then there is a difference between providers but most of the time they all do well so you shouldnt notice it. Your cells (They arent frames or packets with ADSL) flow parallel as far as the handoff point which is usually a large exchange within 2 or 3 exchanges from yours then diverge into the line operators network. So Eirs may break out to IP righ there, Vodafones could flow to their local POP and Skys might route to a BT office in Belfast (just an example). This is where you could see an improvement of X vs Y where a core link somewhere is overloaded or where they've cheaped out on peering.