What should I do?

RicardoSmith

I'm a heavy enough pretty peak time net user as I work from home a lot. Ideally I'd like ASDL but my line failed even though I'm within 1k of an enabled exchange, I'm in a newish house (2yrs) I get 45.5kps on my modem, (used to get 38/40 in my old house a half a mile away) but have failed the line test for ASDL, and no they couldn't give me a reason. No timeframe for when it would get sorted.

Anyway I'm wondering whats a good way of reducing my net costs and improving my connection speed so I can download decent sized files etc. I was considering the UTV flat rate but it wouldn't be any good to me during the week at peak. I also need another line but, I'm thinking if I get one they'll probably put a DAC on the line and ruin my analogue connection speeds. If I get ISDN I won't be able to get ADSL if it ever gets sorted.

Any one offer suggestions? or a good approach to improving my connection? and costs?

the Guru

Yes you can get UTVI flaterate for the weekend

I would suggest that you get a Hi Speed line and a sub account for peak hours if you line does not test succesful for DSL now it will probably not in the future "do you remeber what the eircom person's reason for your line failing was "

if you do get an ISDN line you can still check for dsl on it and if it becomes successful in the future you can revert your line back to PSTN and get DSL installed.

Rags

Hmm if you work from home a lot during peak hours and you failed dsl test. Your only option I think would be 2 way satelite. Every thing else is gonna cost a hell of a lot. Satelite set up costs are high tho. But monthly fees probably will work out cheaper for you. Check the FAQ here for more info on it and prices.

Good luck.

sceptre

Don't forget UTV have a lo-cost peak option as well. You'll still be paying by the minute but it more than halves the cost after the initial €10 payment per month.

(details in the sticky here)

RicardoSmith

Didn't know about the on peak offer ta. Incidentally can you get a high speed line installed without signing up to errorcom?

spongebob

I am amazed that the line should fail if you get 45k on it @1km from the exchange

1. Is it your only line in the house and if not is the line split somehow or do you have 2 wires all the way back to the exchange....typically a new house has 2 underground wires coming in.

2. Try the dsl test again with everything unplugged bar one fone with no display .

tell us how it goes

you have other options in southside dublin, north and west is adsl only.

M

segadreamcast

"I am amazed that the line should fail if you get 45k on it @1km from the exchange"

I get 48-49k on it and am also 1km from the exchange *Sigh*

Ricardo mate, I feel your pain...

Sadly as of now I don't believe you can get a high-speed line installed without going through eircom, bloody E-Tub we live in.

RicardoSmith

Only one line into the house all right. Its a new estate and everything so I was surprised to hear that I couldn't get the ADSL aswell. D.15 so its my only option. I'm thinking of doing the ISDN then switching to UTV.

niallb

Originally posted by the Guru

if you do get an ISDN line you can still check for dsl on it and if it becomes successful in the future you can revert your line back to PSTN and get DSL installed.

Is this a new development?
I was told by Eircorn that I had to downgrade my line to POTS to get the test performed. When I asked how long they'd need to drop the line down, I discovered that she meant downgrading at my expense with a full price full waiting list upgrade back to ISDN if my line failed the test.

I live in D15 at the junction of the M50 and Navan Road, and I was waiting over 6 months for my phone line to be installed. It took another month to get the line upgraded to HiSpeed.

When I originally ordered the line I had asked for ISDN, but was told I had to order POTS and then upgrade as there were no existing lines to the house.

Like RicardoSmith, I work from home and use about 100 hours peak access in a month. I signed up for UTVip on the 11th Sept and was activated business day 9.
This is despite the fact that the €10 peak option didn't exist when I originally ordered,
and was added to the order by phone several days later.

According to Eircorn's charge calculator at
http://mmm.eircom.ie/winback/res/value_calc.asp
100 hours daytime 1891 access costs €116.75 ex VAT.
That's €141.26 + cost of subscription to a 1891 ISP.

I'd be very willing to pay a flatrate
of even €150 per month for 100 hours peak access!
As long as internet access is billed
as telephone calls, how can we demonstrate
the 'interest' in internet access in this country.

Obviously, this would only suit those of us
working from home, but how many of us are there?

Niall B.
CsC

sceptre

Originally posted by niallb

I'd be very willing to pay a flatrate of even €150 per month for 100 hours peak access!

I wouldn't, but the calculations below might please you:

(keeping in mind that IOFFL itself isn't recommending any one package)

Sign up for UTVip Lite: €10.99 per month

Sign up for the "Peak Saver" option: €10 per month

100 peak hours of usage under the saver option: €108
(that's 1.8cents/min*60minutes in an hour*100hours/100(convert back to euro)


Total cost to you of your 100 peak hours: €128.99 per month
(plus you're getting thirty off-peak hours essentially for free)

There you go - you're €21.01 under budget


Incidentally the cost of 100 peak hours with Eircom (using a regular Eircom free dialup account) would be €304.20 (and obviusly you don't get any free off-peak hours) (that's 5.07*60*100/100).

One month of 100 peak Internet hours on an Eircom subscription account (1891 number) would cost €135.28 (again with no free off-peak hours) ((1.95*60*100/100)+18.28)

niallb

Originally posted by sceptre


Total cost to you of your 100 peak hours: €128.99 per month
(plus you're getting thirty off-peak hours essentially for free)

There you go - you're €21.01 under budget

The point I was making was not about a budget.
It was about a change in the description of the service purchased.

As I said, I've already signed on with UTVip, though with the 150 hours rather than the lite,
as it means I can run large file transfers at night.
It also means that the bulk of my costs are going to an operator that is interested in progress.

If we could find out how many people would be willing to pay such a price for peak access, we might enable providers such as UTV to market a 24hour flatrate service.

Sure it's expensive, but those of us who work from home are already paying these kind of prices, and demonstrating an interest and a need for peak access is vital.

We need to seperate the services of telephony and network access. Only then can pricing really start to fall.

Phone bills are like rent, spending the same money on an internet service is a mortgage on future services.

Some months I spend over a quarter of my income on telephone bills. If I could instead spend that money on internet services - even if for now they're provided by phone - I'd feel I was becoming a statistic that showed an interest in internet access in Ireland.

Sad fact is that without spending that quarter, the other three quarters wouldn't be there!

Thanks for checking out my maths for me!
Originally I only ran the 1891 number through Eircorn's calculator. The figure I quoted was for 6000 minutes at 1891 rates. The local call was from tired memory and included rentals etc. It gives a figure much closer to your calculation than the 1891 number.

So how about it?
Anyone willing to sign up for a 100 hour peak package, do I hear 50,30?

Unfortunately, I'm not a telco, but who said new products have to be "launched", let's see if we can order one custom built.

Niall B.
CsC

niallb

More on topic to "What should I do" than my above rant might be this.

I don't know what kind of work you do, or where exactly you are located, but if it would suit you, maybe we could discuss this further, either here or by PM.

It might be possible between ourselves and other interested local parties to rent a small office space in the area where we could "Hotdesk" and share daytime access.
To keep billing simple, we could make voice calls by mobile until we see how it works out.

It would be funny to have to rent a place just so that it could get a DSL line, but between a few people, the costs might be better than what we have now.

My main reason to keep it in the area is the eventual possibility of getting wireless links to our homes from this point.

Legally we would be an organisation, members of an office club, so I think we would be fully entitled to setup remote access to such a link from this location so long as it is reasonably secured.

The local exchange in Blanchardstown is upgraded, so it may not be so hard to find a location.

the Guru

Originally posted by niallb
.

The local exchange in Blanchardstown is upgraded, so it may not be so hard to find a location.

Niall also remember there are 3 exchanges in Blanch and only one of them is enabled .

So check first for DSL before splashing out on Rent

niallb

Thanks for replying, Guru.

I'd be checking very carefully on that.
It's fairly easy to work out the exchange on a building from a known number already in it, so while it might seem awkward to tell an agency to check, if we made it a condition of rental, we might get some results.

ProofWizard

Originally posted by niallb


I'd be very willing to pay a flatrate
of even €150 per month for 100 hours peak access!

If you can afford that then satellite is the way to go. Digiweb are offering 24/7 broadband always on for €119 +vat.
There is the cost of equipment at €1500 but worth it if you are using it a lot at peak times.

niallb

I would already have saved a bit on 2way satellite, but never had the €1500 at one time to make it happen.

Also, I live in a rented house and those are big dishes!

billy the squid

could someone delete this as i posted in the rong thread sorry bout that

STaN

If you really want/need bandwidth, you can wait 3 months and for ˆ99 you can get a symetrical 512 connection through leap.

Its faster than Eircon Ice-Cream, throughput and ping wise.

All you need is an ariel on the roof of your house which they install for you and setup all the equipment (cheaper than an eircon installation also).

Until then you could get Eircon No-Speed and that should see you through most things, until we can embrace the saviour that is leap

... btw im from C'knock Village and i queryed them about when they would have coverage in D.15, and i was quoted by christmas.

RicardoSmith

Problem is theres no way of seeing if a line tests ok unless you get errorcom to do it. And as other people have posted. Somethimes they say "Yes" only to turn around a few weeks later and say "well actually no". In fact they have been know to do this even if they have previously said repeatedly "yes". We know that getting a new line installed in either an existing buliding or a brand new house is not any guarantee that the line will test ok either. So apart from all that I doubt that you will get a terms of lease that agreeds to a line testing for ADSL as a condition. I say they will only agree to ISDN, and you can get that at home anyway.

There is an alternative, however. I've been told that one of the Business parks in Blanchardstown has high speed network installed and that all buildings in that park have access to something like a 2mb leased line. Now I don't know the details, but it might be interesting to find out. Of course if you rent an office then you are no longer working ffom home are you!!!

I work just outside of blanch and have an ISDN in the office. But actually was hoping for something better at home.

niallb

Originally posted by STaN
I
... btw im from C'knock Village and i queryed them (Leap) about when they would have coverage in D.15, and i was quoted by christmas.

I've been in touch with Leap regularly over the last few months and I was also told they'd have a station at the top of North Circular Road in August, but no sign of that. I was told in August that they were in final negotiation for a three rock station which I believe is the one intended to cover this area. Sorry to hear it's been pushed back to Christmas :-)

As far as Ricardo's point of no longer working from home goes, I was hoping if we found a place central to each other we could take the link home via wireless.
I'm not expecting to get any lease agreement with a DSL condition!

Interested in finding out a bit more about that business park though.

RicardoSmith

I thought a wireless lan would be a bottleneck and you wouldn't see broadband speeds on it. Besides I thought the max range is something like 200m line of sight. In our office it wouldn't go through any of the "solid" walls or floors, only the partition ones. So that wouldn't be much use.

niallb

Wireless links aren't designed to go through walls, or (my biggest problem out here) trees.

200m is good for an ordinary card with the builtin antenna, for longer links you need an external antenna. With a high gain antenna carefully aligned you can get a few km from the same cards. Not all cards have an external socket, but many of those that don't can be modified. Speeds on a good line of sight will be at 11Mb and at a longer distance it can drop to 2Mb which is still not going to be a bottleneck on any broadband offerings in this country.

Leap's wireless offerings to the D15 area will possibly be coming from Three Rock mountain which is nearly 10km away. They use a different frequency to consumer cards but should still deliver 11Mb comfortably at that distance.