IBB Bray - Very very slow, how to handle support?

hshortt

Hi Guys,

I've been enjoying my braodband 1Meg connection with very good download speeds on average, however since New Years eve (high winds) I have had absolutely terrible trouble. On New Years Day I had absolutely no connectivity, it appeared as though the DNS servers were not resolving anything. And today, my downloads are the pits. I was grabbing some pdfs from revenue.ie and I could only get one file at a time and the speed was 3.2kb, no kidding! A dial-up would have been faster.

Can ye tell me if anyone else has had a similar prob and if so how was it handled by support? There was no-one available today to take a call so I'm going to call tomorrow. What's the best way to get a swift resolution?

Cheers
Howard

Blaster99

I have the same problem. I haven't bothered with support, but fire away by all means.

richardo

I had no problems with Bray up to around 1pm on New Years Day when there was a brief thunder storm. That knocked out the system for about 8 hours.

Up to then my benchmark figure was around the 500 - 600 kbit range. Yesterday, it was around the 300 mark. 10 minutes ago it was 32 kbits [!] but now it is up to 523. Sort of erratic??!!

IANOC

hshortt wrote:

Hi Guys,

I've been enjoying my braodband 1Meg connection with very good download speeds on average, however since New Years eve (high winds) I have had absolutely terrible trouble. On New Years Day I had absolutely no connectivity, it appeared as though the DNS servers were not resolving anything. And today, my downloads are the pits. I was grabbing some pdfs from revenue.ie and I could only get one file at a time and the speed was 3.2kb, no kidding! A dial-up would have been faster.

Can ye tell me if anyone else has had a similar prob and if so how was it handled by support? There was no-one available today to take a call so I'm going to call tomorrow. What's the best way to get a swift resolution?

Cheers
Howard

this is the problem with IBB mate.when the weather is bad your connection will most likely be naff also.its the only drawback from having a cheap fast connection and it was the reason i cancelled my contract.as when i saw rain or wind i never even used it

My_PI_Nick

wind will have exactly zero effect on your connection, unless of course the anntenne is blown out of its correct orientation, but if that happens, you're connection will either be permantly crap, or completely off. It wouldn't vary like you describe. (well, i wouldn't think so).

Rain should have next to no effect, unless its extremely heavy rain, like what we had a for about 3 minutes a few days ago. The kind of heavy rain where you can't see the grass in your garden from the second floor of your house. That might have an effect. (i was in bed, so i couldn't tell if i had problems or not during that rain ).

The odds are something flooded and shorted (i heard that happened in one of their high sites) and its still not working properly. Give em a buzz, and don't hang up til you get a good excuse as to why it isn't working as well as it did 2 weeks ago. Or, if they say they'll ring you back, make sure you ring them back as soon as the allotted time is passed, and complain about having to ring back.

Sangre

Same thing happened to me but its back to normal it seems now, although I have run them about seriously dodgy pings. Now that I think about it it has happened since the storm but I never thought of it because I slept through it due to not getitng to bed until 10.
Im in Sandyford.

Blaster99

It's certainly gotten a lot better in Bray now, back to semi-acceptable 50-60KB/s type of speeds. Or roughly the same speeds I get with Eircom RADSL except I get those speeds all the time from all destinations and it works all the time. Hopefully by the time my IBB time is up, somebody will have launched an SDSL service so I don't have to put up with this substandard crap any more.

hshortt

Hi Guys,

I spoke with Barry who just reset the radio and then all was well again. He said as already mentioned that rain and winds have no effect unless it's very very bad.

He did ask about possible spyware and told me that my usage was quite high until last week (thanks bittorrent). Anyway that's that!

Cheers all,
Howard

Blaster99

I'm sorry, but does IBB support not know anything? The reason the performance went to crap was because they rerouted the Bray traffic because something clearly went belly up on their network and we got contended with lots of other traffic on the backup link. They've now fixed that problem and we're being routed as before. I pretty much expected this to happen which is why I didn't bother calling them.

If you're interested, the route the last few days looked like this to something connected to INEX (as an example):

1 6 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 3 ms 4 ms 2 ms bray-vl-vlan-1.irishbroadband.ie [62.231.50.193]

3 8 ms 4 ms 6 ms 62.231.32.238
4 36 ms 23 ms 13 ms 62.231.52.26
5 * * 49 ms rte-et-2-7.irishbroadband.ie [62.231.32.182]
6 43 ms 50 ms * ix-et-1-1.irishbroadband.ie [195.26.12.61]
7 28 ms 27 ms 41 ms fa0-0.peering1.inex.dublin.eircom.net [193.242.111.18]

And it now looks like this:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms bray-vl-vlan-1.irishbroadband.ie [62.231.50.193]

3 11 ms 8 ms 5 ms 62.231.32.238
4 26 ms 34 ms 9 ms 62.231.52.34
5 10 ms 17 ms 24 ms 62.231.52.229
6 20 ms 20 ms 14 ms fa0-0.peering1.inex.dublin.eircom.net [193.242.111.18]

Creamy Goodness

richardo vbmenu_register("postmenu_2240403", true);
Registered User


Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Enniskerry
Posts: 82

now that takes the piss,

you live in enniskerry and you've got IBB

i'm in bray and i can't get it

and the tower is in bray.

they really picked the worst spot for the tower, or at least chose two spots like the garda station would be a nice place as anyone that's on the east side of the vevay road can't get IBB

Blaster99

They have to have LOS to 3 Rock as well otherwise they can't get the backhaul over to Bray. That mast at the Garda station would have fairly limited coverage as well, unless I'm mistaken. You're not really missing out on much, though.

hshortt

I'm on Vevay Road and have it, the mast on Bray Head is quite high so really anyone on the Vevay should be ok. I guess if you are down by the schools then you might have a prob.



Cheers
Howard

hshortt

As for the routing issue, it would depend on the protocol that they are using for routing, the differences between OSPF and RIP v2 etc could be why the routes changed, or simply it could be because of an admin error.

Either way, I had crap download before the call, and excellent after.

Cheers

richardo

Cremo wrote:

richardo vbmenu_register("postmenu_2240403", true);
Registered User


Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Enniskerry
Posts: 82

now that takes the piss,

you live in enniskerry and you've got IBB

i'm in bray and i can't get it

and the tower is in bray.

they really picked the worst spot for the tower, or at least chose two spots like the garda station would be a nice place as anyone that's on the east side of the vevay road can't get IBB

Windgates is not exactly the best place for the mast. By my reckoning, they [IBB] chose Windgates because a) there was a mast farm there already, and b) they were trying for Greystones as well as Bray.

If they wanted maximum coverage of the Bray area they would have to place the mast somewhere up around the leadmines in Carrickmines. That would have covered the entire area but I doubt they would have obtained planning permission.

As for my getting the service in Enniskerry - they told me about five times that I was too far from the mast...! But I persisted 'till they came out.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but enyone in Bray should have the option of DSL? It may not be much but it's an option. Up here in the Wilds, we have two options - IBB or f*** all.......

Blaster99

I'm in a bit of IBB slagging mood at the moment, but it's reassuring to see that they know the range of their product (not). I find the fascination of Irish ISP's to artificially limit the coverage area of broadband somewhat puzzling, but whatever they're into.

Around where I live there are a lot of people with IBB, so they seem to have a fairly decent footprint in Bray. Around here ADSL coverage is fairly patchy. I can get it (and have it) but I know others in the vicinity who can't.

Drapper

Blaster99 wrote:

I'm in a bit of IBB slagging mood at the moment, but it's reassuring to see that they know the range of their product (not). I find the fascination of Irish ISP's to artificially limit the coverage area of broadband somewhat puzzling, but whatever they're into.

Around where I live there are a lot of people with IBB, so they seem to have a fairly decent footprint in Bray. Around here ADSL coverage is fairly patchy. I can get it (and have it) but I know others in the vicinity who can't.

Had the same problem in D15, they had switched me to a different "sector" as the called it !! by mistake !!!! and I requested then to change it back, however the service has been up and down like a whores knickers since then , so I have resorted to NTL over the Christmas!!

Ask them to ping your radio from thier side and explain why its not working.................... at the agreed speed !!!

GONNA cut the contract soon !! using it for temp backup.

D

Creamy Goodness

hshortt wrote:

I'm on Vevay Road and have it, the mast on Bray Head is quite high so really anyone on the Vevay should be ok. I guess if you are down by the schools then you might have a prob.

yeh i'm down by pres on the putland road.

i just think that bray is such a big town they they should have two towers, yeh i can get dsl but it's gonna cost me a lot since my anytime provider hasn't charge for a whole year and i got isdn so i've to wait til i get all the money to pay off this then i'll probably get esat.

Omen

I had the same problem on New Year's day and similar crap download speeds after the link came back (even from their FTP site).

I emailed IBB support department and oddly expected them to reply (other then their automated respsonse). This is the second time they haven't bothered to reply. Is it me or are they trying to compete with NTL for the worst customer service award?

I can't wait until I have a choice of service providers so I can spend my money on a company that actually gives a **** about its customers.

uteotw

Dealing with IBB support is an art form in itslef. It's a cat and mouse game. You have to wear them down.

My epxerience with IBB support has been 80% negative / 20% positive.

Usually, emails don't get much reply other than an automated email with a ticket number (that's when their system is working).

You 1st have to gather lot's of "evidence" about your problem, evidence that shows that IBB is at fault and not your PC, or router, or software...etc... otherwise you'll get almost no help.

so...
1. get all the info you need
2. email them
3. call the day after with the ticker number provided in the email
4. ask for name of person on the phone
5. wait
6. call back re-explain everything
7. take name of different person on the phone
repeat steps 6 & 7 as many time as needed.

Just check my signature link to get the full irony of IBB Support.

Axl

Blaster99 wrote:

I'm in a bit of IBB slagging mood at the moment, but it's reassuring to see that they know the range of their product (not). I find the fascination of Irish ISP's to artificially limit the coverage area of broadband somewhat puzzling, but whatever they're into.

Around where I live there are a lot of people with IBB, so they seem to have a fairly decent footprint in Bray. Around here ADSL coverage is fairly patchy. I can get it (and have it) but I know others in the vicinity who can't.

Why would you think it a facination? Dont you think there might be a reason for the limit of the coverage area?