some news about IOL march upgrade

CyberGhost

hey,

Just got off the phone with a sales person, he told me IOL will prolly be doubling their speed and capacity that is 1mb/256kb and 30-32gb download cap

eircom will prolly offer 20gb cap and 1mb too

btw, after 11'th of March they will stop their trials(maybe he was just trying to scare me)

how are iol's pings?

do they charge for going over the cap?

bk

I was expecting Eircom to introduce new Bitstream products in March, they always launch their new ADSL products in March.

This product seems like a reasonable response to the Smart threat.

IOL's free trial promotion is based on Eircoms promotion that they are required to pass on to their Bitstream partners. This promotion ends 30th of March. With them launching new, higher spec products, it is likely they won't offer the promotion anymore.

I don't expect Eircom will re-introduce the promotion until around next Christmas.

From what I have heard, IOL's pings are pretty good and stable, not the very best, but certainly good enough.

I haven't heard of them charging for going over the cap. I believe UTV is the only company who does.

dlofnep

Hrm.. this is good news.. If Eircom double their speed, at least I'll have 1meg until I get smart.

Chalk

if eircom double their speed ill do a merry jig round my router

Xcellor

A 1 meg connection would be sweeeeeeeeeeeeet. However I refrain from gettnig my hopes up because IOL has many conflicting ideas about what is actually going on within their organization. I asked an IOL staff member the other day, "When are we going to get a faster broadband connection than the current 512k?" And he replied, "What do you mean?"

Either he didn't understand my question or he believes 512k is still fast... Worrying in either case if you ask me.

I love IOL BB of course I have not been able to compare it with other providers.... I haven't had serious problems and pings are usually around the 29ms mark to irish servers which is great.

I'm just back from Mexico after spending 7 months there. The house I stayed in had cable internet. Sounds good? It was brutal. I can ping Mexican servers from ireland and get a better result than pinging the same site sitting a few miles away from the physical location of the server!! We are talking about latency which was worse than dialup. Too many users and not enough capacity probably ... I vowed never to complain at my pings again...

Xcellor

dlofnep

I wouldn't worry about that.. Communication between staff in ISP's is like communication between a monkey and a sausage. I walked into work one morning and found out that we had doubled the speed of our clients.. Some guy was like "I heard you are doubling the speeds?" I was like "no.. i'm afraid not" - He was like "Butthe last agent just told me".. So low and behold, we were actually upgrading. I had missed the announcement because I was not working the day they announced it..

So don't be too skeptic if one guy says something and the other guy doesn't. The guys that tell you info are usuallythe guys who don't miss days like I do

CyberGhost

what is this bitstream product? can anyone please explain or give a link?
the excisting customers are going to be upgraded too right?

thanks for answers!

bk

CyberGhost wrote:

what is this bitstream product? can anyone please explain or give a link?
the excisting customers are going to be upgraded too right?

thanks for answers!

Bitstream is the technical name for Eircoms wolesale RADSL product that they sell to other ISP's.

So companies like IOL, UTV, Netsource, Digiweb are actually reselling Eircoms Bitstream product to you.

Eircom control the specification and pricing of Bitstream, so if Eircom introduce new higher spec products or if they reduce or increase the wholesale price, then IOL, UTV, Netsource, Digiweb can pass on the changes to you.

I hope that makes sense.

As for upgrading, I assume there will in fact be two products, a cheaper 512/128k product and a more expensive 1M/256k product.

It is up to each company weither they allow you to upgrade or not. However with the exception of Netsource, I'd imagine that they will all give you the option.

cregser

dlofnep wrote:

I wouldn't worry about that.. Communication between staff in ISP's is like communication between a monkey and a sausage

... I had missed the announcement because I was not working the day they announced it..

The fact that there was an announcement was more than could be expected .

It is true that communications companies have the worst communication. Having worked a summer as a student in one small one, I heard that phrase alot.

1Mb/256Kb would certainly satisfy my upgrade itch for the moment. Especially as I'm looking to network my home. I would be happier with an official announcement for the moment.

Am I right in saying that Esat would have to reduce the contention ratio to at least 16:1 (preferably 12 or 10:1) to achieve that? (as ADSL is 8Mb/1Mb )

Jammer

i ordered my iolBB trial last saturday, will i get hooked up to the 1meg speeds or be stuck on 512k?

cregser

Difficult to say Jammer. The last time Esat introduced an improved service, they offered 2 packages (premium and standard). Existing users were transfered to premium with the option of dropping down to standard (which was their previous service but at a lower price).

Esat may introduce a third service (basic,standard,& premium) and basic may be the 512/128. Since you'll be on a free trial I would doubt if they upgrade your service.

Sorry for the long winded no

Jammer

that is kind of a cheat then. i'd sign the contract for the 1meg service, so i should get a trial of the service im interested in! But still, once its faster then dial up im happy. smart should be here in 3 months anyway so all is not lost

padraigf

*drools* at the prospect of 1m/256k

that would be sweet beyond belief...

Gonzo

if this is true this is great, only problem is will I be able to avail for an improved 1mb connection being nearly 2.5km from the exchange...I would be gutted if I still defaulted to 512k after the upgrade...

Lex_Diamonds

Wowee, I can hardly contain myself. 1meg = 56k of broadband.

Bring on the Smart.

Mr_Man

If this news is correct it is a bit of a mixed blessing. While the upgrade is nice it is unlikely to bring true competition in the Irish Broadband market. Why ?

If enough people remain with the Eircom bitstream product, despite the Smart offering being better, then there is no incentive for the other Teleco's to get off their arse and unbundle the Eircom exchanges so they can offer their own innovative products.

It also leesens Smart's incentive to innovate, why would they bother offering a superior product when they can rake in as much money by not disturbing the status quo.

So heopfully people will vote with their feet, overcome the inertia and switch to the better product. This will then force the others to come up with a better offering, better than upgrading to a 1mb from a 512kb. When that happens it puts pressure on Smart to come up witrh something even better and so on.


M.

CyberGhost

bk wrote:

Bitstream is the technical name for Eircoms wolesale RADSL product that they sell to other ISP's.

So companies like IOL, UTV, Netsource, Digiweb are actually reselling Eircoms Bitstream product to you.

Eircom control the specification and pricing of Bitstream, so if Eircom introduce new higher spec products or if they reduce or increase the wholesale price, then IOL, UTV, Netsource, Digiweb can pass on the changes to you.

I hope that makes sense.

As for upgrading, I assume there will in fact be two products, a cheaper 512/128k product and a more expensive 1M/256k product.

It is up to each company weither they allow you to upgrade or not. However with the exception of Netsource, I'd imagine that they will all give you the option.

Thanks for explaining bk.

btw, talked to iol agian, the existing customers(trial ones too) are going to be upgraded

jozi

Whats this smart thing mentioned above?

1 meg would be a nice upgrade

Jozi

EDIT: i see there's a thread about it

clearz

bk wrote:

This product seems like a reasonable response to the Smart threat.

Eh I dont think so. Persuming they offer this upgrade at the same price how is it.

How is 1Mb at 50 Euro a reasonable response to 2Mbs at 35 Euro.

Xcellor

clearz wrote:

Eh I dont think so. Persuming they offer this upgrade at the same price how is it.

How is 1Mb at 50 Euro a reasonable response to 2Mbs at 35 Euro.

Probably since Smart isn't going to be available to 90% of the population so the fact that IOL is releasing a faster product at the same price doesn't seem all that bad. I mean if you were willing to pay 50€ for 512 then IMO you shouldn't moan if they give you 1024 for the same price...

Sure everyone would like free broadband with no caps, low ping and no contention ratios but get real this is Ireland.

Not a defeatist attitude but a realistic attitude. Any advancement no matter how small has to me met with a level of enthusiasm. Bear in mind the high end users i.e. most people on these boards represent a small percentage of users, the other day one of my customers told me she has broadband to check her email faster?!?! I really felt like telling her "What a waste...." because she will undoubtedly never use that connection to it's fullest capability and the day Eircom switch her to 1mb per second she won't even notice... Tis too sad all that wasted bandwidth,, hahaha but I dont know what's sadder the wasted bandwidth or the fact that I care so much about it!!!

Xcellor

BigMoose

But wasted bandwidth is good!! Means others can stop worrying about contention! :cool:

mayordenis

any ideas if digiweb are gonna be offering this double??

Xcellor

BigMoose wrote:

But wasted bandwidth is good!! Means others can stop worrying about contention! :cool:

Aye but also means there is zero demand (or next to zero) for faster services. Besides why do we need contention anyway? The only people that benefit from that are the ISPs. Provide enough bandwidth for all your customers and provide an uncontended service where everyone gets 100% of their download capacity 24 hours a day. (hahah, that's so far fetched it's laughable.)

Can anyone else confirm this upgrade to 1mb. I'd phone them myself only I got very annoyed the last day when I had to ring tech support and had to wait 25 minutes. Of course they now give you the option to let them ring (Just press "2") you back but I trust a machine even less than the staff there who have on many occasions promised to phone back but never did.

X

Giblet

The press 2 thing is actually pretty good.

bk

clearz wrote:

Eh I dont think so. Persuming they offer this upgrade at the same price how is it.

How is 1Mb at 50 Euro a reasonable response to 2Mbs at 35 Euro.

I said reasonable, not perfect.

Firstly we have no idea how much the IOL product will cost, it hasn't been announced yet.

Second the IOL product is 1Mb/256k versus 2Mb/128k

IMHO the IOL product is much more balanced then the Smart product due to the upload speed. For the most part most people won't see much difference between 2m and 1m. Not unless you spend all day long downloading stuff.

However a lot of people will see a real, noticeable improvement in going from 128k to 256k upload. Specially if you are a SOHO user, run servers or have multiple people in the house using the BB at the same time.

Thirdly Eircoms broadband is installed in far more exchanges then Smart, therefore it is available to a far greater precentage of the population.

Fourthly, for existing BB customers upgrading their existing BB connection with their current provider should be a far smoother process, with little or no downtime. Moving to Smart will probably entail weeks of downtime (going by past performance of Eircom), this is simply not acceptable for most SOHO users.

Fifthly, Eircom and IOL are tried and trusted companies, with a relatively good track record. Smart at the moment is vapourware, they may turn out to be great, but again for SOHO users dependability is more important then price. I fear Smart may turn into another Netsource.

Don't get me wrong, I hope Smart succeed and if they offered a product with at least 256k up and a minimal of downtime on changing over to them, then I certainly would consider them, however for most people IOL/Eircom with a higher spec product is probably just good enough.

BTW this is similiar to how things work in the UK, typically the LLU operators (like Bulldog) offer better products then BT, but are harder to get on.

Xcellor

bk wrote:

I said reasonable, not perfect.

Firstly we have no idea how much the IOL product will cost, it hasn't been announced yet.

Second the IOL product is 1Mb/256k versus 2Mb/128k

IMHO the IOL product is much more balanced then the Smart product due to the upload speed. For the most part most people won't see much difference between 2m and 1m. Not unless you spend all day long downloading stuff.

However a lot of people will see a real, noticeable improvement in going from 128k to 256k upload. Specially if you are a SOHO user, run servers or have multiple people in the house using the BB at the same time.

Thirdly Eircoms broadband is installed in far more exchanges then Smart, therefore it is available to a far greater precentage of the population.

Fourthly, for existing BB customers upgrading their existing BB connection with their current provider should be a far smoother process, with little or no downtime. Moving to Smart will probably entail weeks of downtime (going by past performance of Eircom), this is simply not acceptable for most SOHO users.

Fifthly, Eircom and IOL are tried and trusted companies, with a relatively good track record. Smart at the moment is vapourware, they may turn out to be great, but again for SOHO users dependability is more important then price. I fear Smart may turn into another Netsource.

Don't get me wrong, I hope Smart succeed and if they offered a product with at least 256k up and a minimal of downtime on changing over to them, then I certainly would consider them, however for most people IOL/Eircom with a higher spec product is probably just good enough.

BTW this is similiar to how things work in the UK, typically the LLU operators (like Bulldog) offer better products then BT, but are harder to get on.

Here here agree with all of those points.

I hope they have done proper tests to make sure that their network can cope with upgrade. I wouldn't like the case where yes we all get 1mb connections but sacrifice what I think are excellent pings of 27ms... I worry too much but I've waited longgggggggg time...

X

Vadrefjorde

I would definitely have to agree with BK on the point of upload speed. And on the point of latency, remember when IOL started up first!! There was always bottlenecks on their servers as they were signing up more customers than their servers could handle. Lets hope they've prepared in advance this time....

digitaldr

clearz wrote:

Eh I dont think so. Persuming they offer this upgrade at the same price how is it.

How is 1Mb at 50 Euro a reasonable response to 2Mbs at 35 Euro.

Don't forget the free line rental for the first 100,000 Smart telecom customers!

Sponge Bob

From IIU today"

"I have a 512k bitstream line. I want it upgraded to 1M. Eircom prequal
it, declare it passing for up to 2M, and put through the upgrade. The
line immediately stops working reliably, dropping all packets every
few minutes for approx 2-3 minutes (thereby causing the PPPoE
connection to drop).

The response from Eircom: "Oh, when we say the line prequals for 2M,
we don't really mean that. It's probably not good enough for 1M ". Can
they do a *real* test? No. Can they provide the numeric prequal
results? No.

So, what gives here? The prequal system generates a bunch of numbers,
AFAIK. These detail things like noise, SNR etc on the line. These are
unlikely to be incorrect. These are then mapped to "Pass" or "Fail"
for each DSL product, based on Eircom's algorithm.

SO: (and here's my suspicion) are their thresholds way too optimistic,
leading to unrealistic passes?
"

Dearie dearie me.

Enjoy

DirksDiggler

Regarding up/download speeds with the possible 1mb upgrade, if I'm not mistaken this will mean we can download data at a rate of about 100kb per second, but at what speed will/should data upload?

Oh yeah, it seems based upon an alleged email sent by esat to a board member that one thing has been overlooked by everybody participating in this thread, didn't IOL promise the best broadband package in Ireland?

If thats the case shouldn't we be expecting either a 2mb uncapped package identical to Smart's at a cheaper monthly price or a package at a higher cost but with better upload speeds?

padraigf

Companies can promise anything they want and use any slant they like to say that their package is the best

1024/256 would download at ~115kB a second and upload ~28kB a second

DirksDiggler

I see.....

One more thing, my current 512k IOLBB package, that uploads data at a rate of something like 10-12kb per second. Yes?

padraigf

Yeah thatd be about right. The fastest stable upload speed I can get with my IOLBB is 12kB/s

halenger

DirksDiggler wrote:

Regarding up/download speeds with the possible 1mb upgrade, if I'm not mistaken this will mean we can download data at a rate of about 100kb per second, but at what speed will/should data upload?

Maximum possible downloads/uploads would be: 128/32kilobytes per second.

Simple maths: 1024 / 8 & 256 / 8. On a good day I'd get 55 out of my connection so 110 might be possible. Might even be higher - as in could still lose the same few kilobytes - i.e. 64 - 50 = 14 bytes. If it was the same lose for 1024 connection then we'd get 114 kilobytes but I don't have use of a 1024 connection to test that. Still... 100 would be nice. And 24 or so for upload would also be nice. (basic doubling)


As for IOL's best package? They could always do a "Best Package AVAILABLE" type thingy. Playing on the fact that Smart aren't supplying customers yet or they could even make the play that 1024/256 is better than 2048/128. We'll see in a week and a half, hopefully...

abccormac

Has this upgrade been confirmed? I can't find any mention of it on iol's website so is it just a rumour or will my connection speed be doubled soon?

halenger

They are due to announce it/other in a week and a half. There's no official confirmation yet...

jozi

what about pings, will they get better?
100k would be nice for downloading at.

Jozi

Xcellor

jozi wrote:

what about pings, will they get better?
100k would be nice for downloading at.

Jozi

The speed of a connection doesn't have a direct correlation with the latency of the connection. At least that's what I am lead to believe when people say "Don't use satellite internet connection for gaming because PINGS are crap." The fact that satellite connections can be 2mb+ speed doesn't mean you are gonna get good latency...

However with IOL the pings have always been good with 512 so I hope they will stay that way.

My concerns are that the increase in speed might mean we have to sacrifice our fast PINGs. I hope that's a baseless fear but if you can be sure of anything in this world it's this: IOL will never get it right the first time and will cock up many times reaching a solution but eventually they will...

X

padraigf

The main reason that satellite has such bad pings is that the signal has to bounce a couple of hundred miles to and from the server to get to you .

I could bear having 90ms ping to english servers if it meant i could use twice as high rates in CS:S. Hopefully they'll stay as they are though...

Giblet

Well the routing will be the exact same, but if they slap more people on the connection, or add interleaving you will see a difference.

Scruff

should i order my bb trial off iol now or wait till after march 9th??

Giblet

Well the trials are ending soon

Creamy Goodness

Giblet wrote:

Well the trials are ending soon

they are ending on the 9th aren't they?

Giblet

I dunno, around then anyway.

dogz

is it true that smart are going to charge per hour for their bb, my cousin said he heard that they will do the always on for a while then start charging per hour, is this bs. He also said they they will monitor the connection like iol do for business bb so it will mean no bittorrent or irc

can anyone clarify

padraigf

Sounds liek absolute rubbish to me dogz. If they charged per hour they'd sink like a a lead titanic.

Closest thing to per-hour charging i've heard if is Eclipse in the UK. You get a flat 256/128 always-on and pay per hour to upgrade it to 1024/256 or 2048/256. Not quite as bad a deal but still not good in my opinion.

If they became known as the only ISP that throttled P2P it wouldn't be great for their business either. As to whether it's actually possible to monitor for bittorrent, IRC, etc I'm quite sceptical. I don't think there'd be anyway to do it that wouldn't cost a ton on their side and add a fair bit of latency to your connection.

dogz

thats what i thought, but as regards the monitoring id say that would be easy to just block all traffic going through the port irc or bt uses

po0k

padraigf wrote:

As to whether it's actually possible to monitor for bittorrent, IRC, etc I'm quite sceptical. I don't think there'd be anyway to do it that wouldn't cost a ton on their side and add a fair bit of latency to your connection.

Transparent proxying, packet filtering etc.
They needn't monitor everyone 24/7, just scan each client in cycle, if traffic is detected on a suspect port going to a grey/blacklisted IP, email the client a warning or block the port.
Very easy.

Except BitTorrent is used by quite alot of legitimate sites, www.3dgamers.com being one, and I don't think any ISP would block IRC from a line unless the client requested it.

padraigf

What I meant was that you can ALWAYS change the port youre using. Just port blocking is incredibly crude. Sure they might do it, but in my opinion it's a dreadful solution. BT do it in England and it doesnt work for ****e. My friend there still uses BT all the time, just with proxying.

CyberGhost

Scruff wrote:

should i order my bb trial off iol now or wait till after march 9th??

before, because if you order after you won't get a trial

if your order now, you will get a 3 month trial, and a you will be upgraded

Dinner

If IOL and then possibly Eircom upgraded themselves would/should UTV follow suit?