I’d heard a lot of people complaining about IBB’s services
If you aren’t familiar with them, they are an Irish company that offers a number of wireless internet access solutions to business and personal clients primarily in Dublin, but who have more recently expanded their offerings to cover other parts of the country.
For the past couple of years we have been using Netsource and I have always been very happy with their service. However we recently did a review of our broadband connections and thought we’d shop around a bit.
Digiweb’s pricing wasn’t overly attractive, so we decided against them early on.
Irish Broadband’s pricing, however, seemed to be very good value for money. We were very conscious of the issues that their clients had been experiencing in other part of the country, and had been following some of the discussions closely.
Carlow is a growing regional town and has had DSL for the last 3 years (give or take a few months). Most of the town’s businesses and residences probably have broadband connections from one of the other ISPs, so it is extremely unlikely that the IBB connection would be “maxed out” in the first few weeks.
Bearing that in mind I switched my home connection over to IBB this afternoon to run some basic tests.
One user on the network. No background downloads or other processes.
I should have been getting something close to my connection’s advertised speed. I’m not expecting to get the full speed, as I am all too aware of the various factors that can affect a connection, but that would not justify the low quality that I experienced.
Pings and traceroutes to the “gateway” IP, which is on the mast on the side of the closest mountain / hill should have been sub 10 ms, yet I was consistently getting 60 ms or more.
I also tried a number of traceroutes to various Irish servers via Inex and via other routes, as well as from a number of foreign servers back to Ireland (one of the advantages of running a hosting company! 🙂 )
All tests showed the same kind of results. The connection was terrible.
In a number of the tests that I ran I actually got worse download speeds than I would have done on a 56k dialup connection!
Now it is possible that IBB were having issues or that the connection to Carlow will be improved. However should I have to play the “understanding and patient customer” ?
If the connection was just for my home and was to be used for my “leisure” activities it would be one thing (though 56k is more than a little too slow), but we had ordered connections for our offices as well.
Would I be unreasonable to want to disconnect IBB completely and stick with my current ISP??
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