Contention ratio

Da Man

There are a lot of comparisons between Irish ADSL products and those abroad in terms of bandwidth and pricing. I haven't really followed it all so excuse me if this has been discussed already...

I don't know if anyone has managed to figure out the details of Eircom's new residential ADSL offering, but it seems contention ratio will be high, right?

My brother in Sweden has ADSL and pays the customary SFA for it. But I was using it the other day and it was dog slow. The advertised rate is 500kbps and I was getting nothing close to it. I presume the contention ratio used in that product is very high. My impression was that ISDN is faster. A friend of mine in Sweden uses cable internet, and the story is much the same. High advertised bandwidth, pretty poor in reality.

I use Eircom's most expensive ADSL product right now from work, and it is significantly more responsive. I appreciate that it supposedly gives me 1Mbps but obviously the contention ratio must be lower as well.

So... to get to the point. There's obviously a lot more to these products than just the advertised bandwidth so maybe it's not as expensive here as it seems by international standards?

saik

Irish broadband is significantly worse. Just because a brother, and a brother's friend had a slow day on the internet in Sweden, doesn't paint a full picture. Students can get a ten meg line for less than 20 euro a month. There is far FAR MORE anecdotal evidence of Sweden's broadband DUMPING on Ireland's from a HEGIHT, than there is of the contrary as you have given.

This anecdotal evidence is to be found? If you play games at all, use ASE to scan Swedish servers, talk to some Swedes on IRC, about ping, bandwidth, reliability, price. Ireland falls so incredibly far behind, you would not believe.

Son of Blam

Currently Eircom's I-Stream contention ratio is 24:1, and Esat's DSL (does it have a name?) is 20:1. I don't think anybody has announced what Eircom's cheaper DSL's contention ratio will be yet.

I suppose the main difference between us and Sweden is also the amount of people on DSL. Right now if everybody in Ireland who had DSL was on a 50:1 contention ratio their download speeds would still be getting close to their max because of the lack of people on DSL.

In Sweden practically everybody is on DSL, so that would have a greater impact, I believe. Can you find out what contention ratio your friend is on, and if his slow speeds are common over there? Maybe his DSL is just wonky.

Da Man

saik, relax buddy. We're only discussing mundane ****e like bandwidth here, nothing to get worked up about.

My point was simply that there is more to broadband than just advertised bandwidth and I was hoping somebody had looked into this already. Obviously Sweden is about 100 years ahead of Ireland in terms of telecoms so I was a little surprised to see how relatively poorly these products actually performed.

I'll see what I can do in terms of finding the numbers.

the Guru

Currently Eircom's I-Stream contention ratio is 24:1, and Esat's DSL (does it have a name?) is 20:1. I don't think anybody has announced what Eircom's cheaper DSL's contention ratio will be yet.

48 : 1

Fergus

Although based on the UK, you might find it useful to check out http://www.adslguide.org.uk to get a feel for the realities of different qualities of service and user DSL experiences.