Reliability of DSL - anyone know?

LoBo

Hi all,

We are about to get DSL from esatBT for our company and i'd like to hear from all of you who already have/use DSL. How reliable is it? How often does it go down? How long does it take before its fixed? How often does the high contention ratio (20:1 for esatBT) affect your bandwidth?

Please include what DSL offering you are talking about in your replies.

thanks

Colm

iwb

I can't be of much help as I have only had iStream Solo for about five weeks now but here are my impressions.
1. Between six and seven-thirty in the evenings are not great for IP calls to North America. I assume the problem is on the Ireland side of the equation. All other times I have tried allow me perfect calls. The other side doesn't even know I am using the internet. I don't use it before 2pm Irish time due to the time difference.
2. It has been very reliable. No down time yet. A friend of mine has been down for a whole day back in July but that is the only down time he experienced since he got the service many months ago. (He was on the original trial)
3. In general, ADSL is a proven technology and the actual DSL link will not be a weak point any more than the phone line it runs over. A potential problem might be the interface between EsatBT and Eircom if there is a line problem.
Other than that, it should be fairly reliable. It depends on the phone line, backhaul and network equipement within the BT network.
I know this is an Eircom experience so isn't completely relevant but I hope it helps a little.

Chips Lovell

Like iwb, I've got i-stream solo. Have had it since April and it's hasn't gone down yet.

As for speeds due to contention ratios, it's hard to say. I don't actively monitor bandwidth speeds, but I've never noticed any appreciable dip. Having said that, I'd guess I'm one of the few people in my area with the service and I may not be overly affected by contention ratios.

DC

Only got Esat ADSL (512/256) 2 weeks ago. No problems yet. No downtime and always get full 64KB/s (if remote server allows) downloads no matter what time of day or night.

Its too early to judge though. Contention ratios may not be a problem now because Esat don't have a lot of customers. I'm keeping my fingers crossed though.

Praetorian

The Eircom 1MB is very reliable. 1 day of down time in about 4 months. They were upgrading a server that day.

JamworkS

Yeah .. same here .. no problem whatsoever with Esat. Really fast and reliable. Not a bother.

Where are you based DC?

REgards,

JamworkS

crawler

DSL still kinda new in Ireland so contention is not too bad yet - it will get worse as such............

Line reliability is the issue - it is the same as standard PSTN lines so there is no real SLA as such....

Depends on what you want to use it for - excellent for browsing downloads gaming etc but but not for mission critical stuff!

LoBo

crawler - that's exactly why I'm asking.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people using DSL for their small/medium business - people who had it on 24/7 and were able to tell when it wasn't available etc over the last few months.

I agree with the fact that it being so new that contention won't be a problem yet.

If it proved reliable enough we would like to use it for mission critical stuff - hence my question. My opinion is that its 'always-on', but not guaranteed to be so. Like you said, perfect for most stuff but probably not mission critical.

Thx for the replies so far - Praetorian I presume you got some sort of notice for their server upgrade?

ElNino

I have had ESAT DSL at work for over 6 months. We were one of their original trial customers in Limerick. In all that time we have only had one outage for about half a day. I can highly recommend it.

As per previous replies ESAT has less than 200 DSL customers so contention won't be an issue for a while yet.

crawler

If it's of any help - DSL has mainly been used in the US for residential applications.

Half a day's outage for a mission critical service is simply not an option - but everyone has different meansings for "mission critical" - it's difficult to host a web service with DSL because the IP refresh and the slower uplink so stuff like online shopping , gambling etc is not suited to Adsl.

Where it would really hurt would be if there was a cut in the copper - eircom ( not sure about esat ) will usually take a couple fo days to fix this - you could use ISDN as a back up but if the copper is cut or the exchange fails then you are donald ducked for both services.

No one will guarantee thru' put , availability , uptime , speeds , contention etc on DSL.

At the end of the days it's a case of you get what you pay for - DSL is cheap ( ha! ) and cheerful where as most leased line type services are 1:1 , resilient etc - the issue is cost.

There is no right or wrong answer!

DC

ADSL is definitely NOT for mission critical applications.

For a start you only get a maximum of 32KB/s upstream (i.e. what people browsing your web-site can get) - 16KB/s with €ircon. This won't cater for very many concurrent users, i.e. you can't burst upwards at peak periods. This will change when (if) SDSL comes in. But SDSL will be significantly more expensive.

No SLA means your mission critical application can be down for a couple of days with no redress.

Even the 16/32KB/s upstream is not guaranteed. Could fall below that.

You can get away most of the time with using it for primary mail server, but you SHOULD have an ISP / web host that has a backup MX server for you. Remember, even if you reboot you could lose emails.

For the sake of 100 or 150 euro a year put your web-site with an ISP and get backup MX.

(I'm assuming this is what you meant by mission critical. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

glimmerman

I've had Solo since mid July, and in terms of reliability its been pretty good. I've noticed bouts of disconnections (and reconnections) when uploading large files (through the 128k uplink) which messed me around a bit, but otherwise its been good.

<rant>
But I'd like to take a bit of space here to rant about their customer "service". I got my first bill about 3 months ago, and was basically bowled over by all kinds of weirdness on it (overcharged by my reckoning for the connection charge, an extra "misc" charge (actually called "misc" on the bill if you can believe that) and apparently I was charged for a disconnect request and reconnected (again for a cost) which I know nothing about). So far no one at eircom has been able to tell me what that bill consists of (I couldn't get them to phone me when I asked and left my name and number, and naturally the only people who can help work 9 - 5 which doesn't help me much since I have to work during those hours too, instead of listening to eircom phone ads while on hold).

And personally, given a 0.000001% of a chance I'd switch to esat, since from speaking to people and reading here on the boards, I believe the customer service and latency issues are better with esat (not to mention the lack of cap!!!). Sadly however, Esat aren't selling DSL on my exchange (I'd like to know why that is since I'm in Dublin, why the h*ll couldn't Esat get into the *all* same exchanges as eircom? huh? anyone?)
</rant>

05-12-2002
Although to be fair, today they *were* able to justify the costs (but it did take them a while!)