It must be just you. Everyone I have spoken with has had problems with Nova, and many date back over 6 months without resolution. VoIP has been effected badly and that is the biggest complaint I hear. I hear the same about Eircom BTW.
Any reasonable person will know that their BB connection will never be at its maximum rate all the time. Although Smart are top of the pile for connection speed, at their advertised speeds. I always give credit where it is due and also give out the bad words where they are due too. Us Irish people are often too slow to make a complaint when there is a problem. I prefer to use the word problem and not issue as most do. We are not politicans after all
I too have used BB all over the globe, my business is microwave data links and has been since the 1980's. Ireland is indeed well behind and slowly playing catch upon coverage and service. It will be a while yet before we get realistic pricing. Our service providers are very slow to reinvest in infrastructure. And with bandwidth they are tight as hell, that I have seen first hand when it hits my gear.
Today I spent at a client site in Carrigaline setting up some links and took some time to look into the Nova service down there. My client works from home has some neighbours and friends who let us have a look and check it out for ourselves from two different locations in Carrigaline. My spectrum analyser showed some activity down there and I was able to establish two of these neighbours were on two different sectors. Looking at the antenna is useless when you cant get your bearings in a new location.
The problems people have reported in Cork city are in fact worse in the Carrigaline area. The web stops completely for long periods of time, no packets, nothing. VoIP as previously is terrible!
High latency and high packet loss was observed by both neighbours systems when we compared the tests. These tests were ran over the entire day and I was surprised to see the effect of how the QoS also is hurting the system (in my humble opinion). It is so obvious when you run a battery of tests and plot the data out.
It is not anything new to hear any service provider say there is no problem, Eircom have been doing this for years. Just because your ISP tells you there is no problem does not mean there they fixed it, or have even looked into it.
Only customer pressure in public forums gets problems sorted. If this one does not do it, take it up with the media and interest groups.
I am in Cobh tonight for a job in the morning and will check it out from there later. I hear they have service in Cobh so I will drive about with the speccy and locate the sector. My findings will be posted here to give the full picture.
It is a terrible thing to pay for service and not get what you expect, it is worse when others tell you there is nothing wrong, or nothing they can do. Get organised people and those in the same areas ought to apply pressure and force sluggish ISP's (whoever they are) to get real service restored. In fact since the Carrigaline DSL outage I got plenty business getting links in/out.
Rdgs to all,
pete