Technical piece on Eircom i-Stream

dahamsta

Karl Jeacle has published an excellent technical piece on Eircom's i-Stream ADSL service. It should clear up a lot of questions I've seen asked here:

http://www.jeacle.ie/adsl/

adam

yellum

Good resource that.

Ardmore

Rate-adaptive means that the service will be available to any customer whose line can acheive a DSL rate between 256K and 512K. This should offer significant reachability improvements over the business product where the line must sync up at 1Mb before any service is offered (and yes, this is true even if the customer is only looking for 512K access).

It is important to remember that with i-stream, what you are paying for is always-on connectivity, not always-on data transfer! Think of it just like electricity. You may pay an ongoing fixed charge for service, but the more you use, the more you pay!

Both trial and real-world experience shows that a worse than 90/10 rule will apply to download rates on ADSL traffic i.e.
More than 90% of customers will use less than 10% of the bandwidth
Less than 10% of customers will use more than 90% of the bandwidth

Praetorian

interleaving eliminates line errors and increases reach

It may increase reach but I'm not sure about eliminating errors. I’ve used Eircom and ESAT ADSL and both work flawlessly (0 errors after hundreds of hours online). Eircom of course have the interleaving option on…Whereas ESAT have it off. That’s why Esat’s ADSL has far superior ping times to servers (far superior for games).

Dustaz

Good article but...

The enhanced product imposes no usage charge
If you are a particularly heavy user, you can opt for the high-end enhanced product which charges a fixed rate regardless of how much you download. (This is really quite an anomaly, and could possibly be considered far too generous! It will be interesting to see how long this pricing structure remains in place!)

ho ho ho.

carbsy

Far too generous? Get with the programme Eircon!

bk

It's an "allowance" not a cap or limit
People are quick to point out that there are "caps" or "limits" to using the i-stream service. This is a little bit misleading because you can download as much as you want, but it's a metered service, so the more you download from it, the more you have to pay.

and also

There is a lot of hype about high latency. It's true that some applications are affected, but on balance, interleaving is probably a good thing - at least as a default to start with. The effect on TCP of random packet drops caused by a noisy non-interleaved ADSL line can be disasterous - far worse than any loss of performance caused by higher latency.

Karl obviously reads these boards and perhaps posts, I even have a hunch what his nick is but I won't say

# single user
# 512/128
# ???GB allowance
# 50:1
# rate-adaptive

Hmm, this is interesting, perhaps Eircom is rethinking the 4 gig cap, perhaps they listened to our feedback, or perhaps more likely they are worried about what Esat and UTV will offer.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 4 gig cap was just a rumour circulated by Eircom to trip up UTV and ESAT:

1) Eircom leak a rumour of a 4 gig cap
2) UTV / ESAT set a 5 gig cap
3) Eircom launch with a 6 gig cap and make themselves look like the good guys.

In fact come to think of it even if step 2 above doesn't happen, Eircom leaking a rumour of a 4 gig cap and then actually launching with a sligthly higher cap would be really good strategy by Eircom. We would all be so happy with them launching with a slightly higher cap that we would then overlook the fact that capping + charging for "overuse" at such high rates is just not necessary (see throttling, etc.).

Actually, come to think about this, they already have done this, by setting the price of i-Stream so high, we are all really happy to get EUR 55 DSL, when this is still quiet over priced compared to DSL in the rest of Europe.

Am I paranoid or what?

SkepticOne

Originally posted by bk
Karl obviously reads these boards and perhaps posts, I even have a hunch what his nick is but I won't say

Ah go on tell us.