For anyone thinking of changing provider, it will take around 3 to 4 weeks to complete going by my experience of changing from BT to Digiweb. About two days after placing the order, I was given a transfer application, which I had to fill out and sign to accept that I wish to change ADSL providers. I mailed this off and got an e-mail yesterday (20 days later) saying that my account has been activated along with another message saying that I will receive a modem two days later. So, assuming this arrives tomorrow, it will be 24 days between the time of application to the time of completion. Unfortunately, as the end of April was the new BT bi-monthly billing cycle, I have been billed €80 for the new BT cycle, which I'm not sure if any will be refunded for leaving them.
As I received my new log on details for Digiweb and my BT account is currently still active, it is interesting to be able to test the providers by simply changing the logon details on the DSL modem. However, when it comes to performance, I'm getting pretty much the same transfer rates between the two ISPs going by a few download tests. Interestingly, I seem to get higher results on the IrishISPTest result on Digiweb, where I usually always get above 300k in the evening (unlike BT where it sometimes goes down to 100k). Ping times vary also, for example, at one time I was getting ~100ms ping times to Google.ie from Digiweb and ~300ms ping times to Google.ie when I logged on with BT. However, it can vary the other way around, for example, later in the evening (~10pm), I was getting ~80ms ping times to Google.ie from Digiweb and ~45ms ping times to Google.ie with BT. Basically, going by the performance I'm getting between the two ISPs, it seems like the exchange or Internet backbone in the area is quite heavily overloaded.
Both ISPs show much better performance after midnight and early in the day. For example, early in the morning (7am to 8am), I get up to ~320KB/sec on transfers and 2.61M Down / 320K up on the IrishISPTest. However, as the day progresses, the speed drops. For example, I'm getting a 373K Down / 318K up result at the moment (10:40am, currently connected to Digiweb).
In the end, while the performance does not seem to be any better despite the difference I noticed before in comparing against someone else's Digiweb connection in my area, at least I got a few other benefits such as an extra 10GB monthly allowance (40GB / month), a static IP address and a spare ADSL modem.
