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The thread "Icecomms speed problem" has not received any replies for a month. It has been automatically closed as a result. You may start a new thread on the topic if the information in this thread is not sufficient.
I was told that by this Friday my connection problems should be over. I have to say everytime I ring (and manage to get to talk to someone) the guys are always very helpful and I feel for them but I am paying good money for a service I am just not getting. (The invoices are never slow).
Fingers crossed by this Friday things are fixed up. I really hope they do get it fixed up. The fact the service is good at non peak times like 4 a.m has me thinking it may not be the case, I hope I am wrong.
Paul
Quote:
Originally Posted by Islander
My speeds still bad, 400kbps down, 100kbps up, average. Was away over weekend and had been told that the problem would be fixed at weekend. It was not. Have now been told that they encountered problems whilst trying to sort the interference problems they are experiencing at the mast i am recieving from and they will have it fixed by this friday . i will give them another chance, but am looking into other packages available here in swords and will move asap if things dont improve. the lads at support seem to be gettin pissed of with their own company though as they are being made look silly by saying the same thing over and over again. cant really blame them. If the company cant get its act together its not really their fault.
We have Ices business package 2Mbs up and down.
for the last 2.5 months it has been dire.
Dial up would be better.
Every time you finally talk to them or they answer an email they say they will fix the problem with their mast at the weekend.
Other excuses are :
wind knocking your ariel out of alignment - yet they dont offer to come out and fix it. And yet they tell this to everyone.
We have a crew going out to fix the mast. When its not fixed they say oh, they couldnt get up because of weather.
Really, no one else seems to have a problem.
blah blah blah and so on.
We have been hearing this every week since August. I dont believe them anymore.
We're on the Rolestown mast. Does anyone know if Eircom can give BB in Rolestown now?
I think we're going to get landline phone installed and go for proper broadband. We were using voip but are now cancelling it as you cant hold a conversation over ice broadbands connection. Not good for business
They have really ploughed the depths of bad service (both customer and tech) for the last 2.5 months. They really should be offering refunds to their customers for the last 2.5 months of dial up level service.
Not a hope of Eircom in Rolestown, the "local" exchange is Swords, so no chance at all. Now when they eventually build the new prison, maybe that will mean a new exchange in this area, so a possibility.
Our speed this morning has been all over the place, very slow earlier, and now, a few moments ago, and I don't know if this is a mistake that will get changed back shortly, I appear to now have 2 Meg speed <g>. I did notice that we'd dropped off a while ago, so maybe some upgrades have been done.
Not a hope of Eircom in Rolestown, the "local" exchange is Swords, so no chance at all. Now when they eventually build the new prison, maybe that will mean a new exchange in this area, so a possibility.
Our speed this morning has been all over the place, very slow earlier, and now, a few moments ago, and I don't know if this is a mistake that will get changed back shortly, I appear to now have 2 Meg speed <g>. I did notice that we'd dropped off a while ago, so maybe some upgrades have been done.
It tends to go up and down like a yoyo.
One minute its fine the next its zero.
What you get on speedtests is the average over a few seconds.
Ice will ask you to test with onspeed or toast but this is well known to be a crap speed test. It would show full speed even if you are downloading full speed too. No wonder they ask their customers to use it.
Unlike most people posting here, we've had consistently reliable speeds above 800 for most of the last 6 months, though as it's office, I'm not here much after 6, so the home users don't affect our speeds in the same way.
It was very patchy this morning for a while, then it disconnected for a few moments, and since it came back, we appear to have 2Mb, and if that's the case, I won't complain, as we originally signed up for 1 Mb.
I've just checked it again, and it's certainly a lot better than it was earlier, and on the basis of a couple of "test" downloads, I think the speedtest report is reliable, the downloads are certainly faster than they were earlier in the week
Unfortunatly i have to work on site bacause i cant work over the broadband with it so bad, but i'll check when i get back later. Hopefully it is ok, but its been ok for a day before (several times) and then back to the terrible service that now seems normal from ice.
As you stated all there replies are crap.As I said in previous posts there service works for a while and then dies .There tech support is crap and full of bogus excuses which do not work.My latest one from them is a change of ip address which happens to be worse .My next move is to press 1 on there answering machine and not get another answering machine which does not reply and ask to speak to there new MD
I don't think so. I am getting terrible service too.
This comes from ICE tech support email.
The slow speeds you have been experiencing are a result of Ice Broadband's
recent growth spurt. This added growth has put extra pressure on areas of
the network resulting in slow speeds for some customers at certain times of
the day. Upgrades to the network are planned for this coming week which will
resolve all speed issues on the network.
Strangely when my neighbor also complained they sang dumb and told him nothing was wrong.
They told me by this Monday all would be fixed it has now been ****fted out till the end of this week. Hmm why don't I believe them. I know 5 people on the service all are getting a crap service and support can do nothing to help.
Paul
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bercon Forklifts
Can only speak as I find, just checked it now, 1820 download, 235 upload.
There has to be something else other than network issues for the differences to be so marked.
The problem is not the radio distribution side of things, it's the backbone or server end, which is another story altogether, and that's not an instant fix, the first issue is to identify which part of the system is under pressure, then determine what has to be done to fix the problem, then get the appropriate hardware, and install it, configure it, get it into sync with the rest of the system, and then get it all stable again. Been there, done that, shredded the T shirt, and it's not an easy or quick thing, and can also be expensive to do, so it's important to get it right, rather than trying a quick fix that might be expensive and still not solve the problem.
OK, so ICE have expansion problems, that to me looks like a good problem to have, as long as it does get sorted, I'd rather see that sort of problem than the other way, too few users, too little investment, and then a slow painful death, which is what has happened to things like Chorus cable TV in the Ashbourne area. At least the problems with ICE are because they are expanding.
It is a good problem to have for ICE maybe, not their PAYING customers getting a crap service.
I am not sure where the problem is I can get a ping to my default gateway of about 400ms with 20% packet loss, yet my mate on DSL can ping my gateway and get 20ms response times! Does not look like the backbone is the problem to me, but I cannot be sure. To be honest I don't care what it is as long as they fix it and fix it soon!
They have told me by the end of the week it will be back to what it once was, for me this means VOIP again. I will give them till the end of the week after that I have to look at other options.
Paul
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bercon Forklifts
OK, now we're getting somewhere.
The problem is not the radio distribution side of things, it's the backbone or server end, which is another story altogether, and that's not an instant fix, the first issue is to identify which part of the system is under pressure, then determine what has to be done to fix the problem, then get the appropriate hardware, and install it, configure it, get it into sync with the rest of the system, and then get it all stable again. Been there, done that, shredded the T shirt, and it's not an easy or quick thing, and can also be expensive to do, so it's important to get it right, rather than trying a quick fix that might be expensive and still not solve the problem.
OK, so ICE have expansion problems, that to me looks like a good problem to have, as long as it does get sorted, I'd rather see that sort of problem than the other way, too few users, too little investment, and then a slow painful death, which is what has happened to things like Chorus cable TV in the Ashbourne area. At least the problems with ICE are because they are expanding.
OK, it's patchy. I don't fully understand that, unless it's related to capacity from the aerial to the servers, which may well not be directly controllable by ICE, depending on what they are using to connect from the server to the masts.
My latest test, and this is average of the results I'm getting.
07/11/2006 14:57 1820 kbps (223 KB/s) 235 kbps (29 KB/s) 99 % 23 ms 64 ms
That's the test I ran about 30 seconds ago. I can't complain about that at all, and for the vast bulk of the last 6 months since we went live, I've been gettting good performance most of the time. In recent weeks, there have been some slowdowns, but nothing like the sort of levels that other people are complaining about. I don't know why that is, once a path is established within the hardware, there should be no difference between users, but for some reason there seems to be.
I support sites that are on ICE, BT, Eircom and Imagine, and the only one that has been consistently reliable over the last 12 months is Imagine, and even they were hard hit a while back when Eircom had a major exchange fault. We've already established that (regrettably) the technology being used in Ireland is in a lot of cases the technology that's being removed in other countries as they upgrade to far faster and cheaper services, as I've mentioned, my ISP has a 100 Mb fibre optic cable link for which he pays less per month than I pay for 2 Mb, so there's plenty of room for improvements right across the board.
As far as I'm concerned, I am just very thankful that I can get a broadband service from ICE, as there is no other alternative other than satellite in the location here, and that's just not cost justified. At least this way I can operate on the net at reasonable speeds, and comparable costs to other providers in Ireland, though well above the rest of Europe. In time, maybe that will change, I just hope so.
In that respect, as an example, not too long back, we had all 4 phone lines into the site here out for over 10 days as a result of a cable fault, and that's a business location, and phone cable technology is not rocket science, if it's broken, fit a new cable!!!
Ok, there's more to this than meets the eye, and somewhere, there is another issue with either backbone capacity, or a server that's completely screwed up,
07/11/2006 15:17 1820 kbps (223 KB/s) 233 kbps (29 KB/s) 99 % 22 ms 26 ms
That's my most recent test, all of 30 seconds ago, and it's not that I'm getting good test results but nothing else, I'm also getting similar speeds when I'm downloading updates and the like, from a whole range of sites.
A good while back, on Eircom, there was a problem where one of a whole family of caching servers had crashed.
I was the only customer among 4000 that reported a problem, a repaint of a screen that normally takes 2 seconds was taking 45 minutes. In the end, their tech people found it, and it took them 3 days to rebuild the server, but getting to the right tech people to find what was actually wrong took close on 3 weeks.
I wonder if there is a similar problem here, and if the hosting of ICE is not in house, there may be problems getting from ICE to the hoster, and resolving what the issue really is.
All issues that Ice should be relolving and shouldnt need you to do their job for them.
Maybe if they fire their support team and get you in for a day you could fix it.
Do you reckon you could fix it in 70 days or les ? Ice certainly cant.
QUOTE=Bercon Forklifts;4775]Ok, there's more to this than meets the eye, and somewhere, there is another issue with either backbone capacity, or a server that's completely screwed up,
07/11/2006 15:17 1820 kbps (223 KB/s) 233 kbps (29 KB/s) 99 % 22 ms 26 ms
That's my most recent test, all of 30 seconds ago, and it's not that I'm getting good test results but nothing else, I'm also getting similar speeds when I'm downloading updates and the like, from a whole range of sites.
A good while back, on Eircom, there was a problem where one of a whole family of caching servers had crashed.
I was the only customer among 4000 that reported a problem, a repaint of a screen that normally takes 2 seconds was taking 45 minutes. In the end, their tech people found it, and it took them 3 days to rebuild the server, but getting to the right tech people to find what was actually wrong took close on 3 weeks.
I wonder if there is a similar problem here, and if the hosting of ICE is not in house, there may be problems getting from ICE to the hoster, and resolving what the issue really is.[/quote]
All issues that Ice should be relolving and shouldnt need you to do their job for them.
Maybe if they fire their support team and get you in for a day you could fix it.
Yes, ICE should be solving them, but for all sorts of reasons, they may not have the resources to do so, and that might not be their fault. Firing the support team just makes it worse, in that whoever replaces them has to start from ground zero, and get up to speed.
Me find it and fix it in a hurry? Probably not, finding exactly what's wrong could be complex, and then fixing it could take longer!
I've spent 30+ years working with all manner of computer systems ranging from simple single user PC's up to 300+ user mini's that covered branch offices across an entire country, and not necessarily Ireland.
As an example, a good while back, I had a phone call from the technical manager of the hardware supplier for one of the packages that I was supporting. They wanted my help on a site. As a result of a disc crash, they'd discovered a hole in their software that meant that the backups that had been taken had 160 Kbyte holes every 180 Megabytes. The software was in use in a very large number of sites worldwide, but this particular set of circumstances had never happened before, so the bug had remained hidden for several years.
They needed my help to repair the database. I ended up spending 10 days on site, working 18 hours a day getting it back, and for that entire 10 days, over 280 users across the entire branch network of a major insurance company in Belgium were unable to process over 50% of their transactions, as the database was not consistent.
At that stage, I was one of only 3 people worldwide that had enough in depth knowledge of how that sytem worked at the depth that was needed to be able to recover it. The other 2 were in Australia and New Zealand.
Similar things happen now with PC based systems. I spent 3 hours yesterday working out why I couldn't log in to ROS after Microsoft Update had automatically downloaded IE7 on to my computer. Turned out that an applet needed by ROS had to be reinstalled, and the account I use for Web acccess has no admin rights, so the applet would not install clean. There was an error message, but it didn't give an accurate reason for the error.
Ran ROS in an admin enabled account, and I can now get back in from the "normal" account, because the applet is back in place again. I will guarantee that there will be a good few support calls to both Microsoft and ROS over that one, but it's not "a fault" as such, but a combination of things all coming together at the same time.
Yes, there's been a lot of angst towards ICE here on this board, but how many people are actually posting? 5, 10, or less. How many ICE users are there, and how many are actually being hit by this. Depending on the numbers, this might not be that high on the board at the moment, even though it is causing huge pain to the few that are here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting ICE in that respect, and I don't work for them, but I am trying to make sure that a balanced view is taken, in that there may be other things behind the scenes that are influencing this.
Yes, ICE need to get it sorted, and ideally they need to do it fast, but if there are in fact a number of different issues, some hardware, and some network, and some radio repeater related, they may well be working damned hard behind the scenes, without it showing yet.
Then again, yes, they might not be as capable as I'd like to believe, but my experience is that once we were connected, and that did take a lot longer than it was supposed to, the service has been OK, and has provided what was advertised, and still is.
The thread "Icecomms speed problem" has not received any replies for a month. It has been automatically closed as a result. You may start a new thread on the topic if the information in this thread is not sufficient.
Was away over weekend and had been told that the problem would be fixed at weekend. It was not. Have now been told that they encountered problems whilst trying to sort the interference problems they are experiencing at the mast i am recieving from and they will have it fixed by this friday
. i will give them another chance, but am looking into other packages available here in swords and will move asap if things dont improve. the lads at support seem to be gettin pissed of with their own company though as they are being made look silly by saying the same thing over and over again. cant really blame them. If the company cant get its act together its not really their fault.
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