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Small Towns/ Villages with good broadband

YankIE

Hi There-

We are moving to the ROI, and are in the process of trying to determine precisely where we are going to live, within ROI. We are looking at a small town or village (rather than a city).

I'm a freelance web-designer/ marketing consultant (with primarily existing USA clients)- hence the freedom on choosing where to live/work.

We have multiple criteria on choosing a location- but lack of good internet access is a deal-breaker, so thought we'd start with that in narrowing down areas.

BTW- we rely heavily on VOIP, and the most important time for quality calls will be in the evening (USA working hours)...

So, any guidance on general areas where we can feel confident that entire towns/regions have decent access? Entire regions to rule out? Or would it really be hit and miss, and we'd have to find a place, then try and figure out if we can get good internet prior to closing on lease?

We are still pretty wide open on location- but FWIW, west/south county cork seems to have a fair amount of rural lets in our price range/size.

Thanks!

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Mark in Lucan

uncle_sam_ie wrote: »

North Cork. I'm three miles from the exchange so, it's the best I can get. There are two wireless companies here that will do 6Mb but, I don't have line of site to one of them. The other is Ripple but, they charge if you go over your limit. And, from what I'm hearing the service is patchy and they're not a good company to deal with. So, I'm stuck on a 2mb line. I guess I'm lucky though some people around were I live can't even get on DSL.

Your neighbours must be on carriers (3 lines/carrier) and you on a copper.
Are there any '3' masts around? '3' can be reasonable if directly in sight of mast (+ external antenna with modem, B683...). Other providers may be similar. I got 15Mbps once with '3' on E5331 modem but generally 5Mbps.

YankIE

Thanks all for great info. You've all definitely confirmed that I'll need to be careful as we move further away from the cities. Some comments below...

ScumLord wrote: »

Any town near to Dublin, Cork and Galway can have decent enough internet speeds up to 100-150gb if they have UPC

On the business side- the most critical thing for me actually isn't raw bandwidth- its latency & jitter for VOIP, as well as uptime. VOIP only needs 100kb per line reserved. Massive bandwidth would be nice, but isn't a deal breaker for me (my family's personal usage consumes far more raw bandwidth than I do in my business- they may not completely agree, but less gaming & tv streaming won't hurt them...:)).

I generally get by with just 5-10Mb Down & 1-2Mb up using cable. Fairly standard where I currently live in San Diego (way short of the advertised rates). We do have extremely good uptime, and very low latency, jitter, & packet loss to the VOIP servers I currently use.

ScumLord wrote: »

Although having said all that 4G will be coming on line soon enough and Ireland is so small we should have pretty decent coverage throughout the country.

Hope to be in Ireland by end of May- so my guess is this wouldn't really be an option.

bealtine wrote: »

I just ran some engineering tests on the local 3G mast (I'm less than 200 metres from it and it's rarely loaded) I got 1.5 Mb/s upload and a 200ms ping.

I have 4G LTE on my iPhone- I just did two tests. See attached if curious... One from wifi (which uses my cable connection), the other on LTE. I'm surprised at how fast it was- anecdotally seems like its hit & miss on my phone, but I actually don't pay that much attention. (BTW- the wifi/cable test was sharing two pandora music streams & one netflix movie stream, while it was running).

niallb wrote: »

You could also get satellite broadband in addition to a low bandwidth DSL line, and use the satellite for the heavy lifting

Good suggestion- I'll keep in mind. Lower cost housing would probably easily offset the higher cost of two internet connections. I'd actually done something similar in the past (different business- one where we actually had a call center using VOIP). Voip phones were on their own LAN, using ADSL connection. All PC's were on different LAN, using cable internet. Worked well for assuring call quality- plus having a failover came in handy on several occasions.

bealtine wrote: »

If you're looking at towns Bandon/Clonakilty/Bantry/Skibbereen/Kinsale you should expect a reliable broadband connection. Unfortunately, it will be far from what you're used to in the states, probably about 8mb.

Those were some of the towns that caught my attention- so that's somewhat encouraging.

bealtine wrote: »

Some of these exchanges below will also offer VDSL late this year ( I bolded them) and only the bolded ones will offer a decent upload speed over 2mbits (5-10mbit range)

Thank you for the specifics! This helps immensely with narrowing the candidates.

Sponge Bob

YankIE wrote: »

Thanks all for great info.

Latency on DSL is cack owing to Interleaving settings. A WISP should be able to ping a selection of servers that you nominate and deliver stats.

You lose around 120ms from Ireland to west coast usa and 90ms to the east coast ANYWAY. You could easily lose another 50ms across Ireland.

A long period ping ( ping www.www.org -t ) should indicate jitter and spikes over 2 or 3 mins.

ED E

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Latency on DSL is cack owing to Interleaving settings. A WISP should be able to ping a selection of servers that you nominate and deliver stats.

You lose around 120ms from Ireland to west coast usa and 90ms to the east coast ANYWAY. You could easily lose another 50ms across Ireland.

A long period ping ( ping www.www.org -t ) should indicate jitter and spikes over 2 or 3 mins.

Was just about to post this, you'll lose a lot going transatlantic. VOIP may end up not being practical.

Sponge Bob

And eircom routes all its transatlantic traffic through Telehouse in london so whan the packet leaves west cork it travesl 500 miles plus to London transit or else to Level 3 in London and then wanders past Cork on a transatlantic cable after another 500 miles .

So having already travelled 1000 miles+ eircom now have the Voip traffic within 100 miles or so off Mizen Head south west Cork ...innit

Same waste of time on the way back too giving a compounded 1800 miles of inefficient crap routing after which its gotta get to America and across America.

Time was eircom sent the traffic to America VIA West Cork but it still had to transit their core in Dublin. Them were the days when we had a Celtic Tiger too.

YankIE

ED E wrote: »

Was just about to post this, you'll lose a lot going transatlantic. VOIP may end up not being practical.

Hopefully that won't be the case. I've been successfully using it between rural UK (accessing a london server) and USA, and call quality has been good, without too much lag on transatlantic calls.

The service I use (voip.ms) is dirt cheap, and highly configurable (with one of the best features having a local or toll-free number that rings anywhere in the world). I pay less than a cent per minute for US<->UK (ROI slightly over a cent). Won't give up on that too easily....

I should probably start researching landline-based solutions, just in case though. Particularly concerned about giving my USA clients a US number, that forwards to me in Ireland. I love how it works with VOIP- just rings through to the softphone on my laptop, wherever I am, and clients don't know any different.

Sponge Bob

Well if you launched out of rural UK then add another 800 miles (( rural Ireland to Telehouse to US MINUS rural UK to Telehouse to US) and back) and its not too bad considering London West Coast US London is 6000 miles plus and 12000 mile return the way networks align themselves.

Latency on landlines is lower, perhaps look at the Level 3 conferencing solution which is not too expensive and gives you the option of 1800 conferencing if you are not at home in ireland or VoIP conferencing if you are. US interests dial a landline number. Cogent do something similar using VoIP and you found a solution that works in London....which may come with UK Geographic number dial in whcih can be bought flat rate with telephony in Ireland as long as no call exceeds 59 minutes.

I thought you was in San Diego, try to be clearer next time.

YankIE

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I thought you was in San Diego, try to be clearer next time.

Sorry- I am in San Diego, but DW is British. Its why its relatively easy for us to move to Ireland (EEA freedom of movement rights). In fact, just picked her up at airport this evening on a return from Heathrow. We were testing out the VOIP in UK while she was visiting family...

Thanks for the suggestions on alternate telecom solutions.