Anyone here on IBB Guinness mast?

IDUBasher

Hi,

Is there anyone else out there on the Guinnesses mast experiencing absolutely appalling performance from breeze product as of the last week or two. For me, It has never been very good, but I was willing to put up with only half of the advertised speed for a while, so long as pings and network performance remained reasonable. However, now it appears even that was too much to hope for.

Here's a breakdown of what's been happening for the past few days on my end. All times are approx and all pings have timeout of 10000ms, bandwidth tested on www.irishisptest.com.

6am-5pm, connection is fine, 15-20ms ping to jolt.co.uk with no packet loss and about half of the advertised bandwidth for the product I am using. The 2mb(24:1) ‘yeah right’ residential product to be precise.

After 5pm, packet loss kicks in, 5-20% over 20 pings to www.jolt.co.uk, bandwidth drops to around 150kb down and around 110kb up.

Early hours of the morning, packet loss increases dramatically, 5-75% packet loss over 20 pings to www.jolt.co.uk, bandwidth drops to 2kb down and 2.5kb up. In fairness, I'm not often up this late, but still have managed to see this happen twice in the past week.

I haven't had the opportunity to have my complaint discredited by IBB yet as I have had little time during their support hours and tbh it just isn’t all that appealing based on past experience. But one thing is for sure, I will no longer find the reason “most subscribed mast” to be an acceptable excuse, after all this is their problem not mine.

As it stands now, I hope to get some grabs of pings and bandwidth tests over the coming days. Then, I’m going to print them and include them with a formal letter of complaint addressed to IBB management.

So basically, my questions are:
Is anyone else on the Guinnesses mast being screwed over with rubbish performance at full cost?

Has anyone else ever written a formal complaint into IBB?
Did they reply?
If so, how’d it go down?

Cheers.

muckwarrior

Dunno bout Breeze but im on ripwave on the Guinness mast and I've been gettin dialup speeds for the last few days.

zuma

Dammit lads/lassies Ive heard a lot about the guinness mast and a lot of it has been BAD.

IDUBasher
Rename this thread to "Anyone here on IBB Guinness mast?" to get more replies to your question.

IDUBasher

Yeah, I have heard plenty of bad things about that mast myself, much of it from IBB support themselves :mad: The following is the results from tonights testing. This is the stuff I will be including with my letter of complaint, assuming I don't just get pissed off and cancel the contract.




The result is dif everytime I run the tests but this is pretty much on the midground of performance as of late. It dosn't say much for this country if a company can get away with passing this kind of crap off as acceptable. I'm going to run more tests early this morning to see if it drops to the 2-3kbps with 50%+ packet loss I was getting last night.

zuma

Youve got a fairly fast 33k modem there.....whats this about broadband???

IDUBasher

zuma wrote:

Youve got a fairly fast 33k modem there.....whats this about broadband???

lol, I'm actually not too far from blowing the dust off my old 56k modem with the way things are, hearing those clicks and squeeks will bring back happy memories of when the internet was actually useable. The joy.

IDUBasher

Well it is now 5am and it's looking like something good must've happened. Yay. Still only getting slightly under half of the bandwidth I should be getting but ping shows a marked performance improvement over the last test.




I'm betting that this is only temporary and that in a little over 12 hours from now the whole thing'll fall flat on its arse again.

Drapper

IDUBasher wrote:

Well it is now 5am and it's looking like something good must've happened. Yay. Still only getting slightly under half of the bandwidth I should be getting but ping shows a marked performance improvement over the last test.




I'm betting that this is only temporary and that in a little over 12 hours from now the whole thing'll fall flat on its arse again.

GIve em hell dont get off the phone until you get a straight answer and ask to speak to the tech mamanger ! tell the muppets you dont feel you issue is being professionally dealt with !

Ardent

I'm on the guinness mast (ripwave), speeds have been diabolical for the last week or more. Time to drop IBB and go with Smart methinks.

IDUBasher

Well, this is getting worse. I have rang IBB twice today with not much joy.

1st call. Speaking to a guy called Barry, he didn't appear to be understanding exactly what I was trying to explain to him and this aggravated me somewhat. I clearly said, I'm having a problem with packet loss and network reliability and he started going on about download tests from ftp.esat.net and such. At this point I had enough of talking to this guy and just went trough the motions. He claimed he "fixed the IP" and that my connection had throughput of 200KB/s even though on my screen it was more like 40KB, Pure scripted bull**** if I've ever heard it, is like having a conversation with an answering machine.

2nd call just before 5pm was much more productive. Speaking to a guy called Radik who actually appeared to have a clue. He ran some ICMP tests and such and did notice the problem himself. He told me that I have a SNR of 29 which is apparently a very good signal strength and also that the Guinnesses mast contrary to what others in IBB have said, has not been that heavily contended over the past days and that the current i/o is only 3mb. The strange thing is his tests indicate that there is a problem somewhere between my radio and my gateway as there is no packet loss from their gateway to my antenna, but there is from their gateway to my gateway. This is a little odd considering the trace routes I've run. But for the sake of not being wrong I decided not to challenge the conclusion he reached until I'm 100% certain that my side is sound. He said he'd ring me back on Monday to see if anything has changed and if not I could take it further. This is reasonable for now and I was just glad to talk to someone who wasn't being patronizing and just reading a script.

So, I decided that new network cable would be a good place to start. I put together a new cross over for radio to gateway and found that it changed nothing. Still erratic on packet loss and ping times. I then changed the NIC I'm using for my external interface with a spare I had about the place and there was no change. Still borked to hell. This leaves me with software as the culprit or possibly interference, but I'm certain enough that this is a problem on their side to not be bothered with reinstall of os and my router software. I'm going to drag the connection off to another machine at some point and see if the performance is exactly the same which I highly suspect it will be. As of about 19:30 this is how my connection is.

Drapper

pings look good ! are you a heavey downloader? as i've heard throught the grape vine they are contending heavey downloaders on the same stream !

IDUBasher

Drapper wrote:

pings look good ! are you a heavey downloader? as i've heard throught the grape vine they are contending heavey downloaders on the same stream !

Hi,

I'm not a heavy downloader, unless 3.5-4gb this month is considered heavy. I don't have logs of previous months but I know I don't exceed 30gb even in the busiest month.

Also, those pings aren't that good, yes the returned times are ok, but the extreme flux in performance indicate serious network problems. The thing that kills me about it is one minute it is perfect with no packet loss and steady pings, but the next it goes to the dogs. In my opinion IBB simply don't want to admit any liability because if they do people will want to be compensated.

Here's a little something I found on the web.
What is packet loss?
Packet loss describes an error condition in which data packets appear to be transmitted correctly at one end of a connection, but never arrive at the other. This might be because:
* network conditions are poor and the packet became damaged in transit;
* the packet was deliberately dropped at a router because of internet congestion.
Taken from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/loss.html

I'm not a pro, but have been around the net long enough to have learned a thing or two here and there and in my opinion something truly bad is happening within IBB's network and they don't want to admit it for the obvious reasons. Almost all the traces I've run indicate problems up to and after their gateway DN42-ae0-50-ibis-gw.irishbroadband.ie [62.231.52.157]. I can't even check the path from my gateway to my radio because the damn thing doesn’t reply to icmp. You see this as the second hop in my traces. Well sorry to rant.

I got to admit though, I expected many more people to be complaining considering the severity of the problems.


Some more quick questions,
Anyone got any ideas on how to check the route to these radios?

There must be more ppl out there on the Guinnesses mast who can check their connection and don't like being ripped off, common?

Sponge Bob

packet loss of 5% or higher ... 1 in 20 packets on a continous ping .....would reduce a 2mbit connection to 100k (allowing for all those resends and assumed delays ) . fixing the packet loss issue alone would improve matters immeasurably.

Drapper

IDUBasher wrote:

Hi,

I'm not a heavy downloader, unless 3.5-4gb this month is considered heavy. I don't have logs of previous months but I know I don't exceed 30gb even in the busiest month.

Also, those pings aren't that good, yes the returned times are ok, but the extreme flux in performance indicate serious network problems. The thing that kills me about it is one minute it is perfect with no packet loss and steady pings, but the next it goes to the dogs. In my opinion IBB simply don't want to admit any liability because if they do people will want to be compensated.

Here's a little something I found on the web.
What is packet loss?
Packet loss describes an error condition in which data packets appear to be transmitted correctly at one end of a connection, but never arrive at the other. This might be because:
* network conditions are poor and the packet became damaged in transit;
* the packet was deliberately dropped at a router because of internet congestion.
Taken from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips/loss.html

I'm not a pro, but have been around the net long enough to have learned a thing or two here and there and in my opinion something truly bad is happening within IBB's network and they don't want to admit it for the obvious reasons. Almost all the traces I've run indicate problems up to and after their gateway DN42-ae0-50-ibis-gw.irishbroadband.ie [62.231.52.157]. I can't even check the path from my gateway to my radio because the damn thing doesn’t reply to icmp. You see this as the second hop in my traces. Well sorry to rant.

I got to admit though, I expected many more people to be complaining considering the severity of the problems.


Some more quick questions,
Anyone got any ideas on how to check the route to these radios?

There must be more ppl out there on the Guinnesses mast who can check their connection and don't like being ripped off, common?

Dude they are having backhaul problems, you can get from the radio to the basestation perfect, but if IBB aint got enought bandwidth, which they need then you get high pings and bad ul/dls, I've bben through so many bad peiods over the last 12 months and I'm ditching it next month !

ask for a tech team leader to admit there is backhaul problems, the monkies in the tech support willo fobb you as long as they can to fix it out !

BTW there is 100's of other tread with the same problem !!! your not the only one !

hold tight or ditch !!

lampsie

Just to confirm my Ripwave running off Guinness (BTS 110) has gone to dialup speeds for last two weeks or so...was on to IBB twice, second time techie went through the motions and said he'd given my modem 'higher priority', but its had no effect. Something is foul on the Guinness mast.

- lamps

Nevyn

something is foul with thier entire network,
Time outs and drop signals all over the place that is just trying to
browse boards.

father_ted9t9

This is still the same!! AAARGH what can we do! max of 10kbps download speeds!

RangeR

A simple test is to ping your gateway [you should already have the ip address] for a period of maybe 100 pings. Just to average things out over acoupld of minutes

ping 0.0.0.0 -n 100
Where 0.0.0.0 is your gateway ip address [or highsite]

If things are normal between your radio and highsite, which would be 0 packet loss and on average 2ms to 4ms latency on average, then it HAS to be a problem with their network. No question about it.

This is the test I've been doing EVERY day for 5 or 6 monthe. I'd also run it a few mintes before I ring their support line. Just so I'm sure there is no problem on my end.

I've also purchased [because of IBB performance] Ping Plotter and Multi Plotter. These two products do an excellent trace of your connection every few minutes or seconds. Depending on how you configure it.

If you're having problems, just run ping plotter for a few hours and throw it's logs at IBB. What can they say, it's there in black and white.


Hope this helps.


RangeR

dalk

Hi...

I'm connected to the Guinness mast as well:

DN04-fe-1-3-1-160-guinness.irishbroadband.ie [62.231.46.73]

I had it installed about a month ago and it has ALWAYS been terrible. 56k+ speeds with 5-40% packet loss consistently. And i usually just ping the mast itself, never mind what happens after that. As stated before its the inconsistancy of the connection that makes it unusable imo. Good connection for half a minute then packet loss and high latency for half a minute: repeat ad infinitum.

I complained the very first day that it was installed, and twice since then. Have given them the benefit of the doubt (ie that they will fix it) since then.

But i am doing the same as the OP. I'm gonna keep a record of ping/connection speed at various (random times) for the next week. Then i am going to write a formal letter of complaint to IBB (with attached results), and request that i be disconnected and refunded. They have not delivered the service that i paid for, simple as that. Then i am going to write a letter of complaint to Comreg (for what its worth).

Then i will take my chances with Smart and see how that pans out...

Ardent

IrishTLR wrote:

A simple test is to ping your gateway [you should already have the ip address] for a period of maybe 100 pings. Just to average things out over acoupld of minutes

ping 0.0.0.0 -n 100
Where 0.0.0.0 is your gateway ip address [or highsite]

Following the above instructions:

Ping statistics for 83.141.105.1:
Packets: Sent = 43, Received = 15, Lost = 28 (65% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 88ms, Maximum = 230ms, Average = 143ms

Not good.

prospect

Hi guys,

Where do you go to get that speed chart. I have been using a crappy eircom.net one with a picture of a indian bloke!

brav

http://www.irishisptest.com/myspeed/

prospect

nice one,
chunks.

dalk

Ok... Heres the results from pinging the first point of my connection to IBB (ie the mast itself). I am connected to the Guinness mast... I pinged it 200 times, once a day, at a random different times for the 7 days:

Min Ping Avg = 1.85ms
Max Ping Avg = 2393.85ms
Average Ping Avg = 212.57ms
Packet Losts (%) Avg = 12.28%

And thats just pinging the first point. From experience, after that it gets even worse... I havent even bothered with download speeds, because with latencies and packet loss like that you spend a lot of time twiddling your tumbs waiting for pages to load.

In fairness packet loss has decreased from about a 20% average a month ago, but its still not acceptable.

I will be forwarding this info to IBB and requesting that my account be terminated etc