It’s nothing to do with who’s online. Eircom and all other providers told me my line would give me a guaranteed 8mb, with one laptop connected to test the speed I get 3.2mb and that’s my max. I live in Dublin and we are yet to get fibre speed lines in this area.

Unless it’s fibre power there’s no way the guaranteed you anything. They’ll tell you the max speed your package allows 8mb but the contention ratio alone will slow that right down.

The speed I get fluctuates by almost 5 mb depending on when I check it. Sadly until fibre optic cabling is rolled out theres not a whole pile we can do.

One of the main reasons I switched from eircom was they kept telling me I had 8mb the truth was the exchange I was connected to was only capable of 6mb with congestion typically got 3 to 5mb.

Too many other providers leases eircom lines and resell the very same service.

I went with upc who guaranteed the speed because they have their own independent network.

Sorry to disappoint you See My Vest but eircom recorded the sales call and when they went back to It they released me from an 18 month contract because their sales staff did need promise 8mb as they are doing across the nation. He also gave me a monthly deal for a great price for the next 12 months. They are all lying through their teeth, one thing I will say is I have measured the speed and it is consistently at 3.2mb which no other operator could do.

Ya’s are all mixing up Speed with Bandwidth. Speed on an internet link is measured in milliseconds, i.e. latency. Data throughput is measure in MB/s, ie bandwidth and just for the record ‘Fibre Powered’ is just a buzz word invented by ISPs, all broadband is supported by a back end Fibre Network. Most UPC “Fibre Powered” is delivered to homes over Copper Coax. Bandwidth advertised by ISPs in Ireland and most other countries is maximum achievable bandwidth.

Well said! The advertising of speeds really needs to be more regulated. They shouldn’t be allowed advertise “up to” speeds. Which basically means, they’ll charge you the full rate for the 70Mbps but, since your antiquated Eircom owned exchange can only handle 1Mbps, tough luck!

John F you are right AND wrong. Latency does indeed measure the ping times or how fast a signal travels from a to be and back to a again.

However, if you are downloading a large amount of data a 50 Meg line will, essentially download it ten times quicker than a 5 Meg line, if both have the same latency.

So download “speed” can indeed be measured in Mbps.

@Enola. I am well aware that a 50MB connection will get you your movie ‘faster’ than a 5Mb connection but as you pointed out, this is not to do with speed but to do with how much data your computer receives in intervals. ISPs generally try to interchange speed and bandwidth when they are not interchangeable…

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/bandwidth-not-speed

I live in Belfast and am on Virgin Media (UPC’s northern equivalent). I pay for up to 30 Mbs and I rarely get less than that. Sky’s up to 20 Mbs usually averages around 4/5 Mbs. My upload speed is a pitiful 1.75 Mbs. Suppliers should work on providing guaranteed minimum up and download speeds and improve latency so that we can all access data fast on smooth connections, get rid of annoying buffering of video and do so for reasonable rates. Computer manufacturers also need to put hardware into their products that doesn’t slow down and which can genuinely multitask apps.

Luckily for you the north was never subjected to the likes of Eircom blocking line upgrades right and left. I’ve always suspected it wasn’t because of the expense involved as they bleated but because they were gouging all of us on our international phone calls and could see that revenue source disapear if we all had bandwidth that could cope with VOIP calls with software such as Skype. Now that it’s available on our mobiles with appls like viber and skype they’ve lost the monopoly anyway and are begrudgingly having to update the lines to save what’s left of their business, which is now just renting out their lines to other phone companies, before another company comes along and takes that away too by putting in a high speed network. I pay for 30Mbps too… I’m lucky to get 1Mbps… although sometimes the contention rate is horrendous so it slows down to almost nothing. They must have half the county on this one line.

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