Worst kept secret in broadband but speed increases are always welcome.
Customers currently availing of a 3Mb, 4Mb or a 6Mb product will see significant increases in downloads speeds which will at least double. They will be upgraded to 7.6Mb, 10Mb and 12Mb product respectively. Customers currently using a 2Mb product will be upgraded to a 3Mb product.
More than 240,000 wholesale and retail customers will now see their broadband download speeds increase
How many do they have on DSL, inc the resellers? That’s a lot of people that are on 1Mb broadband so.
New Speed : : : Old Speed : : : When increases will happen
12Mb/1Mb : : : 6Mb/512k : : : March – May 2008
10Mb/832k : : : 4Mb/484k : : : March – May 2008
7.6Mb/672k : : : 3Mb/384k : : : June 2008
3Mb/384k : : : 2Mb/256k : : : June 2008
1Mb/128k : : : 1Mb/128k : : : N/A
I know some people that got the “upgrade” and their speeds were far from doubled. All depends on your line. But even when you are near an exchange, this might not be a guarantee.
Edit: Yes, the upgrades are free. I doubt contention ratios will change.
No price changes , or am I being overoptimistic ???
And the upload speeds are still pathetic
Hmm, what about contention ratios… will they increase or decrease the numbers of users in the pipel;ine?
Will this then allow a “class system” of Internet users in the future? A fast lane for the rich and a slow lane for the poor? And me stuck here on the verge with dialup for a while yet! 🙁
Seems there may be some price cuts somewhere along the line but these have not been published yet.
Their 1mbit and Timed 1Mbit customers ( the majority) get nothing .
Eircom has roughly 540,000 DSL customers . Only 240,000 are being upgraded …namely those on 2mbit or higher.
Thats 44%.
However 56% will get nothing .
[…] Mulley has more details – looks like we will have to wait until March to April. […]
@ Caoimhin – I totally agree. Why not make 2mb a standard rather than 1mb? Ridiculous.
Line Lengths Are Thorny
No matter what flavour of ADSL you use a lot of eircom lines are long and creaky.
They will only ever support 1mbit or even 512k stably . Otherwise many are OK lines but long and old. These would be the unsplit ones of course. the split ones are pure rubbish .
The all time distance records I personally know of are a netch over 3miles for 2mbits and a netch over 5.5 miles for 1mbit , neither is quite the full 2 or 1 mbit and both are a tad lossy to boot .
These distances in km are 6.5km approx and 9km approx.
You would cut off large swathes of people if you upgraded your standard package to 2mbit from 1mbit .
In distance terms and doing a dreadfully crude 🙁 pi x (r squared) calculation an exchange with a radius of coverage of 6.5 km covers 3.15x(6.5×6.5) km squared or 133km2 .
At a nominal length of 9km it would cover 3.15x(9×9) km sq or 255km2
Thats almost double the geographic coverage (very crudely) which shows the impact that a doubling of entry level speeds could have , particularly in rural areas .
Best instead to introduce a brand new 2mbit package as soon as all the current 2mbit customers are upgraded to 3mbits I think , same price as the existing 1mbit 🙂
The price of the 1mbit could be dropping as well .
Looks like those of us that will be getting over 8Mb will all need new modems/routers too. The Netopias (33xx series) only support DSL up to 8Mb.
No doubt we will have to pay for the new ones.
Thanks Damien.
And just to ask a really basic question – I have to assume that the reference to wholesale customers means that the bump up in speeds automatically passes through to the various packages from the likes of BT?
keith
PS – I suspect the answer to my question lies in this somewhere 🙂
http://blog.siliconrepublic.com/2008/eircom-launches-12mb-broadband-service/
keith
OK Damien, now your really rubbing salt in the wound – our 3Mb connection is currently delivering a blistering 14.4k connection down here in the sticks!
@ Caoimhin – I’d love to be getting dialup speeds!
Nobody cares unless they’re dropping the caps.
Eircom’s standard 10GB / month will just be chewed up more quickly, enabling them under their contract terms to bill you by the Mb at a punitive rate or cut you off when you hit your monthly quota.
at 1Mbps: 22 hours and 46 minutes
at 3Mbps: 7 hours and 36 minutes
at 7.6Mbps: 3 hours
at 10Mbps: 2 hours 19 minutes
at 12Mbps: 1 hour 54 minutes
Only in this third world backwater could upping line speed just be another way of fucking your customers.
Has anyone actually been charged for exceeding their cap?
I certainly haven’t. For January it was approx 12GB. More no doubt since not all traffic goes through my proxy.
From the 23rd to the 31st of Dec. I hit 6.5GB alone.
Screenshot here.
Upgrading equipment in the exchange and closer to the NOC means sweet FA when the copper in the ground is still rotten….
spin, spin, spin me round, round, baby….
I agree more speed is good,
Sorry for ranting , but here goes
altho there prices are still way too expensive for the qos we get here , And speeds here with eircom are “rate adaptive” which means even tho you pay for a 3mb etc. line you don’t nessarly get 3mb as opposed to what I signed up for when I first got broadband from eircom it was adsl ( asymmetrical digital subscriber line) guarrented 3mb
Would this be false advertising ? ( They recently added the “rate adaptive technology” to the website information, Think I said to much on the phone )
Eircom switched with out informing me ( us mer customers ) , I would have liked to know before … great PR I have to say.
Its been down all day too , 8:45am ( short connection at lunch ) to about 11:59 pm , rang tech support hadent been notified of an outage all day till 5:30 where they confirmed it was out ( no supprize to me ) Tried to tell me it was my firewall ( pfft ).
I wonder do outages get deducted from our bills? suppose 99% uptime covers that …
[…] Perhaps that’s how they can afford to increase their customers download speeds… […]
Any idea when the 3MB –> 7.6MB upgrade will happen ?
I have eircom broadband 3MB but when i check the wireless network connection icon in the right corner it says speed:54mbps
and varies from 24 mbps to 36 mbps to 54 mbps
what is the difference in MB spped that the broadband company advertise and the speed in mbps. Please reply!
Confused,
You are confusing two different (well slightly) things. The 24/36/54mbps is the speed of the connection between your pc and the router. This is relevant only if your broadband connection is this fast, which is unlikely. So you can have a 3 mb connection TO the router but this just means you are only using a fraction of the bandwidth between your router and pc. The speed of the connection will only really come into play if you are transferring data within your home network, ie video streaming.