broadband v cable best provider

relocatelondon

Hey

My wife and I are relocating to Dublin at the end of June and we would like to know who the best Internet provider is..who has the best speeds and best Internet package with phone and tv..

Thanks

M

blue_blue

You'll get tripe-play services from the cable & phone operators. Virgin are the cable provider, speeds up to 360mb. For services through a phone company, 100mb is the fastest you'll get, some of that bandwidth will be taken up whlst watching tv.

awec

Virgin has the best internet by a very large margin but their TV is pretty crap. Sky have the best TV package by a very large margin but their internet is pretty crap.

It depends on what sort of TV you watch really. If you only watch the common stuff like RTE, BBC, Food Network etc you are better going with Virgin and getting Sky Sports and Sky Movies through them if you want those.

On the other hand if you want the likes of Sky Atlantic (Game of Thrones etc) you'll probably want to stick with Sky as Sky Atlantic isn't available on other tv providers.

Alternatively you can get your TV with Sky and internet with Virgin (providing you're allowed to put up a dish for sky) but you miss out on bundle benefits here. If you're moving to an apartment Sky may not be possible.

I've never used eir but their internet is ADSL (phone line) so comes with all the usual caveats.

Samuel T. Cogley

There are only two providers:

Eir - who everyone by Virgin Media use and Virgin Media. Virgin media is great unless it isn't. Where Eir have typically been poor everyone is on VM and it gets congested. VM's service is also shocking and they aren't adverse to just deciding that half the customer base can't have X service. For example look at the issues with Netflix.

Eir's service is similarly ****e and actually in certain areas including Dundrum they are by far the fatstest service provider with 1000Mbit connections.

Sky/Vodafone - are actually the same provider - BT Ireland, but use Eir's lines so the speed is the same, service is a bit better but really it doesn't matter that much unless you're one of these people that can't use google to figure out a problem. There are then some more exotic providers doing wireless, satelite and stuff. Vodafone doing power-line very fast broadband in certain areas and some smaller players also on the Eir lines.

Really though everyone buys into the hype of I neeeeed mega speeeed!!!!11! Then they use the default wifi and are limited to about 30Mbit anyway. If you're a power user you wouldn't be asking (sorry to be harsh but it's true) so go with whoever can give you more than 50Mbits and nice extras like installed boosters, good TV or no TV if you don't want TV. Also don't default into bundling - it makes no sense what so ever unless you're in the can't google category and can't organise two direct debits. Bundling only makes sense if it's cheaper, it frequently isn't. I was dual Virgin Media and Sky for years and played them off each other - eventually I did bundle for other reasons, went from 240Mbit to 57Mbit. The only time I can tell any difference is downloading steam games. It takes 15 minutes to download rather than 5 so I get time to make the tea and drink it rather than just make it and let it go cold.

Virgin's MASSIVE advantage is they can set you up very quickly if you can't organise these things ahead of time.