broadband - sligo

[joefish]

Right i have a choice of

Perlico
Eircom
Imagine
Irish Broadband
Cintineri

Who would you go with in the Sligo area and have you had good or bad experiences with them.

Ill be looking for 1mb and as far as i see due to them all using eircom lines the contention ratio is 48:1

I deliberately left out BT as i initailly used them and had broadband for 2 minutes and nothing but problems after, one word of warning STAY AWAY FROM BT.

[Knightowl]

Joe,

I've had broadband from Eircom for a few years now from two different locations in Sligo town. They're not the cheapest but I cannot complain about the quality of service. It's been consistently good. My 2M bit connection regularly “clocks” at 1.75Mbit
I tried to change to BT two years ago when moving address but it proved to be such a pain; I bit the bullet and went Eircom. At the time BT couldn’t even offer date for a new line connection, never mind DSL.
If you're not in a DSL area, Fastcom is a local wireless provider (if you haven't heard of them). The offer a symmetrical 2Mbps package with a 24:1 contention ratio for €40 a month including VAT.

[joefish]

Im on the DSL alrite, pity i have to return to eircom but BT are just the worst of the worst of the worst,

Have you any experience with 'Imagine' I hear they're OK

[Sean]

Another one worth checking is Digiweb DSL. I started off with BT's 2Mbps service, which worked quite well up until the fall of 2006, where my performance was regularly going below 500kbps on the Irish ISP Test reports. So, I decided to switch over to their 3Mbps service, which worked well until early this year, where a similar issue happened again.

After trying three times with their support, where they never got back to me, I switched to Digiweb's 3Mbps package. About two days after my account was activated, my connection has been consistently over 2Mbps on the downlink (usually 2.5Mbps) and over 300kbps on the uplink. Even at this time of writing, I'm getting a 2.5Mbps downlink on the Irish ISP test report, something I generally would never see on BT with it being a Sunday evening at this time of writing.

If you are willing to put up with Eircom's higher pricing, their broadband performance seems to be very consistent, at least going by the people I know of in our area and my connection at work. On the other hand, if things go wrong, Eircom's support can be a nightmare, as they love to blame the end user or their equipment and I have wasted hours on their support trying to help people out, since usually it takes around 30 minutes of being on hold just to get through.

As far as I'm aware of, Imagine and Perlico both require the customer to switch over their telephone service to avail of their broadband service, however, I haven't heard anything about how well each performs. I haven't heard of Cintineri and Google returns no info within Ireland for this keyword, so I assume this is a community / locally run broadband service.

If you are looking for high traffic allowances, I would recommend having a look at Irish Broadband DSL or Imagine DSL. Both offer unlimited traffic allowances, although with a fair usage policy. From what I read around here, Irish Broadband DSL seems to give fairly consistent performance. It is unclear what they consider as as the fair usage, where as Imagine give a guide of 25GB per 1Mbps package (e.g. 50GB for 2Mbps). However, the drawback with Imagine is that they appear to require one to switch to their phone service and there is little info around in the past couple of months about how well their broadband performs.

[joefish]

Thanks for the replies lads and especially the extensive one by Sean, ive made the conscious decision to revert back to eircom, the reasons being they are consistent, they own the lines and there is something more comforting about them having engineers who will actually call out to assess the infrastructure or hardware deficit which seems to the customary reasoning so many tech support lines of companies give.

I dont mind paying the little extra if i have consistency and eircom i feel can justify the extra cost due to having staff to warrant it, never have I ever, ever came across such incompetence until I had dealings with BT. One word of warning to anyone thinking about going to BT........ DO NOT !

Thanks again