I've been through them all... Eircom copper (through EsatBT now Vodafone Ireland), Irish broadband (now Imagine) through the air and now we have UPC delivering their coaxial bandwidth with fiber backhaul.
I was very impressed with the UPC technician arriving yesterday, a Saturday, 2nd of January. We only very recently discovered that the UPC service was
finally available in our particular area of Dun Laoghaire. When I started
video conferencing back in 2003 it was on the promise that the Irish "smart economy" could deliver on the promise of "broadband". Now, while that "broadband" definition has always been a bit of a joke, perhaps "always on" might be a better way to describe it. I've been through them all. Irish broadband were at one stage able to give me a synchronous 5mb each way, which for an up speed was spectacular and I was prepared to pay over €100 per month for the privilage. Unfortunately tree's got in the way... noise resulted and loss of signal. I argued the point with (Irish broadband) for months and for the lack of a clear line of sight had to abandon the service. EsatBT delivered for a short while too, twisted copper from the Eircom exchange could deliver relatively decent speeds if they bothered to upgrade the exchange. Sadly the local Eircom exchange is held together with sellotape and will possibly never be upgraded, so no matter what the incumbent promises, that last mile is critical to delivery a quality signal and speed for every business in the country.
So you can imagine, with the prospect of UPC delivering a promised upgrade tomorrow of 30mb down and hopefully a relatively decent speed out of 1+ mbps I'll gladly accept the upgrade. Right now as it stands I'm able to obtain almost 20mb down and a sub 1mb out. That will work... but on a little further investigation I have noticed a very poor result from the
Pingtest.net now I'm getting the dreaded "F" GRADE on pinging the local Dublin server hosted by Digiweb. So, quality of service is possibly an issue, this certainly warrants further investigation. Video conferencing requires a good quality line even with buffering technology enabling data streams to and from the server, packet loss can have negative implications in terms of delays on delivery (consistency) of the data streaming. I suspect a 30 meter Ethernet cable from router to PC may also provide the answer... so maybe time to swop it out and get a new cable.
Results are as follows.
