Leinster Broadband aka Kildare Broadband

[paulclane]

I use Leinster Broadband as I had no chance of getting broadband over copper pair. Callidus Wireless were an option, but their installation charge was too expensive and they said they were only 1Meg up and down. Leinster Broadband quote 1meg up and down in their literature, but they say they have an un-official speed of 2Meg up/down. Which they did have, for the first week or so. Unfortunately, the access point they use from Grange Hill seems to be faulty and needs to be rebooted regularly, which seems to happen a lot on Friday or Saturday, so I might have no or very little access for the whole weekend. This has been the case for the last two weeks.

Do not expect a speedy roll-out to your location from Leinster broadband. It took more than six weeks and a million phone calls before they did a site survey. A friend of mine has been waiting more than three months and has given up on them. I was talking to somebody in Kilcullen, Co. Kildare yesterday and they have severe problems with Leinster Broadband too. It seems that a lot of the time they are repairing their existing infrastructure rather than dealing with new customers. It's a pity really, as they all seem to be very nice and very helpful people. Maybe in a few years time they will have gotten their act together. But by that time, Eircom should have rolled out ADSL2 and they are about to start testing Wimax from Dunmurry Hill, near Kildare town, they may have started already. I made a load of phonecalls to Eircom to become involved in the Wimax testing, but the sales people or their "technical support" personnel don't have a clue.

Here are my results:

Date Download Speed Upload Speed Qos RTT Maxpause
14/09/2006 20:32 578 kbps (71 KB/s) 363 kbps (45 KB/s) 57 % 42 ms 375 ms
14/09/2006 207 572 kbps (70 KB/s) 142 kbps (18 KB/s) 52 % 118 ms 480 ms
14/09/2006 206 480 kbps (59 KB/s) 259 kbps (32 KB/s) 66 % 41 ms 314 ms
14/09/2006 206 317 kbps (39 KB/s) 71 kbps (9 KB/s) 76 % 0 ms 574 ms
14/09/2006 09:59 1172 kbps (144 KB/s) 1416 kbps (173 KB/s) 57 % 37 ms 166 ms
14/09/2006 09:58 1738 kbps (213 KB/s) 1581 kbps (193 KB/s) 44 % 30 ms 409 ms
14/09/2006 09:58 2043 kbps (250 KB/s) 1726 kbps (211 KB/s) 71 % 32 ms 159 ms
14/09/2006 09:55 914 kbps (112 KB/s) 428 kbps (53 KB/s) 49 % 37 ms 195 ms
14/09/2006 09:54 678 kbps (83 KB/s) 1274 kbps (156 KB/s) 65 % 32 ms 507 ms
14/09/2006 09:54 636 kbps (78 KB/s) 66 kbps (8 KB/s) 60 % 78 ms 345 ms
Total Averages:
913 kbps (112 KB/s) 733kbps (90KB/s) 60 % 45 ms 353 ms

As you can see from today, the broadband has been up and down. I got all excited when I saw the 2meg download and 1.7meg upload earlier on today and I thought, great they have the problem fixed, but tonight it's back to rubbish. It wasn't working earlier on , so I couldn't test then. I was hoping to play XBox 360 online tonight, but not a hope with that sh1tty 71k upload and disastrous QOS. Even when I do get stable speeds there is a notable latency, so not good for voice at all, as it breaks up quite a bit. I would definitely not recommend Leinster Broadband if you want to play online gaming, it will break your heart. And with that high latency, (delay), you'll be dead before you even see your online opponent.

In conclusion: when it works it's brilliant, but it is on the blink more often than not.

I have been using the service for more than a month now and don't know whether to switch to Callidus or stick with Kildare broadband, in the hope that they will sort out their problems.

[Broadband Starved]

I have been having a nightmare with Leinster Broadband since last April. We have satellite broadband but its latent, not always up to speed and costly. We have been trying to get Leinster Broad Band to provide us with a service ( 2 services actually for 2 different business premises ) now for over 6 months !. They never return calls, take weeks to answer e mails and fob you off when they do. I have had the same experience as Paulclane, been told they are up grading or putting in new equipment and will get back to me by such and such a date. The last time they were supposed to be back was 7th September, nearly a month later and still nothing despite my reminders. . But what happens if and when you finally get it installed and it breaks down, will Leinster Broadband be able to provide any service ? , has anybody had experience of their after sales service ? . I have just been in touch with Com Reg to see if they can do anything. These people have the license for our area ( Dunlavin , West Wicklow, ) and the talk around here is that you cannot even get a phone call returned from Leinster Broadband. Would anybody know of another wireless supplier that could service West Wicklow ? ( We can not get land line from Dunlavin exchange )

[therealboss]

Originally Posted by Broadband Starved

I have been having a nightmare with Leinster Broadband......

SNIP......


Would anybody know of another wireless supplier that could service West Wicklow ? ( We can not get land line from Dunlavin exchange )

You could try www.torque.ie they cover your aera.

[Broadband Starved]

Thanks for that. Have tried Torque as well., same story as Leinster Broadband., Calls not returned, e mails not replied to ( I have read receipts ? ) . first tried contacting them on the 21st April last. Have sent numerous reminders and also there phones ring out or are on answering machines. I need 2 separate connections for business purposes ( one for a Hotel; ) , somebody said that these providers do not want large business on their service as it takes up to much band width Has anybody any idea if there is any truth in this argument.
Also Lesineter Broadband did eventually send a survey engineer over 2 weeks ago, but only when I threatened to go on the Joe Duffy show when the argument about telecoms service providers was raging. Of course now they will not come back with the results and yet again fail to return calls or e mails. What is com reg doing about these cowboys., ?

[paulclane]

I have to be honest here, I never have a problem getting throught to them.
They all come across as very nice people, but they seem to spend so much time fixing things that they never get a chance to do any upgrading. My you, I was promised that they were increasing their back haul up to 10 or 15 Megs, (that is what I was told, not very precise).
And when I speak to them they are always very, very nice , and of course apologetic. Some weeks I have had to ring them every day, to find out why I have no service/ slow service. They ring me back when it is sorted.

I posted my original post six week ago and in that time I had hoped that things would get better, but they haven't. I now never even try to play games online as it is so slow and laggy, which was my main reason for getting broadband. The owner of the company had promised me that they were great for online gaming, but that was a load of sh1t, except for the first week I had it when it was fantastic.
I know some companies that use their service and I know that at least one was nearly in tears with the unreliable service. Companies need a rock solid service, but Leinster Broadband can't provide it.

So, yet again, I recommend you avoid Leinster Broadband for the moment. Maybe they should stop taking on new customers for the moment and fix their existing clients problems, before they get such a bad reputation that nobody will touch them. But they are nice people and they are trying hard. I think they need to step back and have a look at their whols setup up.

You could try Callidus or even Quantum for your BB. I know Quantum have new sectors above Kilcullen. I can't imagine much luck in Dunlavin, it's way too mountainous. Mind you, I did haer that some farmers had a sector near the quarry. I can't remember the name of it though.

[mullins]

I am also with Leinster Broadband.

The service is rarely up, and when it is, it is insufficient for anything other than browsing. FTP connections disconnect, online gaming is impossible.

Like others, it was fine for the first week or so, but since then I spent an entire year complaining with no success. They fail to ring back. They fail to reply to emails. They deny they have a problem, and now, I see they are adding new customers to the network without having increased capacity.

I am currently waiting for Callidus/IFA Telecom to come out and install their system for me. It is more expensive, yes, but if it works it is better value than giving Leinster Broadband 35 Euro a month for nothing.

It will be another 2 or 3 weeks before Callidus get out to me, but I will let you know. In the meantime I would not recommend Leinster Broadband to anyone.

[i_gothere]

If it's sattelite, there's your problem.
Sattelite is not actually BB, since the latency is pretty much hyperslow.. it should actually be called Sattelite Internet, but who is going to be honest when the Regulator doesn't even care about things they _could_ help with?

[Broadband Starved]

I am celebrating today, but only because Leinster Broadband finally got back to me after 8 months of phone calls and e mails. For once ( I think this is what happened ) com reg stepped into the breech and got them to respond. But the bad news is if I want the service I have to pay an installation cost of €5,850 + Vat and then a monthly charge of €400 for 1 meg down. This would be according to them a contention free 1mg for us. However this is more expensive than the 1mg down by Satellite which I have now. We have also found out that there are only 1 or 2 people in Dunlavin with the Leinster Broadband Service, and this is up and down like crazy, however Leinster say its a test site and apparently nobody as been charged yet. The receiving / transmitting mast for Dunlavin is located near the local bookmakers, and gets is power from a socket on that premises. At first those using the service could not figure out why the thing went down after 6.00pm, now they know, the lads in the bookies were turning off the all the plugs when they went home every evening ! . This is supposed to be Ireland in the 21st Century, one of the wealthiest nations in Europe, sounds more like rural Russia.

I informed com reg about the situation in Dunlavin and asked if we could get a community license and bring it in ourselves, a big stony silence on that one. Ok then what about forcing the company licensed to supply us to do just that, again a stony silence. Well what powers do com reg have over cow boy suppliers, nothing. Ok finally if com reg can do nothing about it, who can, you guessed it silence again. So the question is who is regulating the regulator. ?

[johnnyg]

I've had Leinster Broadband since April. I get my feed from the Hill of Allen.

The service has been a bit of a nightmare. Bandwidth is generally pretty good, but latency was very variable.

When I looked a bit closer I found that it was dropping packets like they were going out of fashion -- drop rate often more than 20%. However, the pattern is very variable + generally much better over night eg last night there was a four hour period when not a single packet was dropped.

I created graphs for Leinster Broadband so they could see the times when it suddenly switched from no dropped packets to some dropped packets -- all they had to do was look at their logs to see what else changed at that time.

They tried to tell me that it is interference, but I'm not at all convinced that is the case -- I'm sure they have something screwed up on their network somewhere.

About six weeks ago they called and said they had found the problem, some of the boxes rolled out to my neighbours had a dodgy default setting and were themselves acting as access points. They said they needed to go out to those locations and fix the boxes and would let me know when it was done.

I sent an e-mail 3 weeks ago to check if they had done anything: no response, sent another one more recently: no response.

This week I've signed up for Callidus. More than a bit annoying that I'm having to pay a second connection fee. If it does the trick though there will be a long letter going off to COMREG. My understanding is that they are completely toothless, but at least they should be put in the picture.

Shame about Leinster Broadband -- was good to get someone finally providing wireless out here + I feel for them with the network issues -- stuff like that can be hard to resolve. But not responding to customers is inexcusable.

John

[johnnyg]

Guess what? I had an e-mail from Leinster Broadband followed by a phone call this morning -- just a few hours after posting the above message.

What an extraordinary co-incidence. The owner actually came round to the house to do some tests on the link. Guess which site he used for a bandwidth test? Yes, this one!

Unfortunately, the link was in one of its rare good phases when only dropping a fraction of 1% of the packets.

Interestingly, no packets at all were dropped when pinging from the tower to my box -- the problem appears to be in the other direction, although given the low drop rate at the time it could be coincidence.

Had long discussions with owner, but not sure it is leading anywhere -- I have to call next time the link is bad.

John

[paulclane]

Even more strangely, the owner also rang me last week, for the first time ever. Due to some settings I made to their wireless radio I was reasonably happy with their performance when he rang, but he insisted that I was getting huge packet loss and would change the radio on my roof for a much better one than the existing Stella Doradus unit. Which they finally did this morning after I waited in three separate mornings for them to arrive.

Have a look at my speeds when i changed my settings last week and compare them to my speeds from tonight, which are totally useless. Well done Leinster Broadband. I get very, very pissed off when i can't play XBox 360 on a Friday Night after a very hard week at work. (See attachments below). OK, so maybe I look like a spoilt brat whining about not being able to play, but I do pay up every month, so I expect them to keep their side of the contract. The owner assured me personally, before I joined up, that lots of his clients played online with no problems and that it would be great for me.

I have written TWO detailed replies, one on ComReg, (how they are there to protect the investment of Eircom and to a lesser degree, other comms companies and that they don't give a damn about you or I) and the other on the lack of security on many ISP wireless links, (they are LAN not WAN: I can resolve the computer names, IP addresses etc, of other wireless users on their network, and some dodgy git could easily hack into any of them, USE A HARDWARE FIREWALL. They should not be using bridge mode, which leaves networks transparent), but both times my connection failed and my posts were lost, so you'll have to do with my brief synopsis.

The dodgy default setting Leinster Broadband told you about is "Universal Repeater Mode". I have connected to several of the wireless radios of people in the area, (on their roofs), and on some of them it was indeed enabled. It CAN contribute to interference. Most of the ISP's here seem to use the default channel 11. I wonder if this causes problems too.

Getting back to the wonderful new radio on my roof and it's sh1.tty performance, if it's not raining tomorrow I'll take it down and hand it back to them on Monday.

But, just to reiterate from earlier posts: I have no problem at all contacting them and they have always been extremely courteous and helpful, so absolutely no problem there. I know that they are trying their best to resolve their problems, but it is painfully obvious that the fault lies in very high contention and overloading of two of their hops back to servcentric in Ballycoolin, (obvious because it is fine during the day and crap at night when people come home from work. Other ISP's balance each sector by putting on some home users and some business users, so that it should never be overloaded. I wonder if LBB do this too.

BTW, they have upgraded the bandwidth on their backhaul recently, but it didn't to do much good here, just a slight improvement, until today.

And yes, they do read this forum.

[mullins]

I have had the Leinster Broadband antenna taken out and Callidus in. Callidus is a significant improvement but at the moment contention is low. I have only had it a few days and there have been some slight glitches, but nothing like the crap that Leinster Broadband are conning you guys with.

I will let you know how it goes, but I expect they will be getting more customers in the near future which may effect performance and I would expect to see the glitches ironed out.

Just on the increased capacity which Leinster recently installed.
Yes, they did, but they then immediately connected up lots of new customers and negated the improvement.

I am sure they will continue to spoof on about interference and guys using p2p slowing their network (despite the fact that managing contention is their responsibility), but at the end of the day they are not in a position to provide the service, and after putting up with their crap for a year I realised they ain't getting better but worse...

[LisaIRL]

Last night our download speed was down to 24.5kbps and our upload speed was a mere 5.8kbps. What a joke... I rang and left a message telling them that my crappy eircom dialup was twice as fast and if this was the best they could provide then I wanted to cancel the service. No one rang me back today...

Tonight the speeds were so bad that MSN IM and skype wouldn't even log in. Again I've rung and left an irrate message on their vm. Lets see if anyone rings me back tomorrow.

I've rung so often at this stage complaining about the speed of our connection that I think the receptionist actually recognises my voice... she's always very nice and promises to get someone to check out the problem, but that's as far as it goes.

They did change our ariel at one stage but we didn't see any improvement... they've come out, climbed up onto our roof and told me the connection is fine... and to be fair during the daytime you could get a decent enough speed - i once even got an upload speed of 1.7 megs on a 1 meg connection! But forget it at night time, its a disaster... and as for weekends *sigh*.

I wouldn't or couldn't recommend them either. In fact I've told several people to steer clear of them because the service is just so irratic.

[robertmuldoon]

I live in the Calverstown area, and had a lot of problems initially with LB, however after a lot of phone calls and house visits, i find over the last month or so the situation has improved considerably.As i speak my download is running 842kbps, upload 1.81Mbps, however i find that during evening time speeds can fluctuate a lot, but not enough to cause me serious concern. Overall i am quit happy with the product. I suppose it depends on what you need your broadband speed for as i am not into downloading games etc, but i do use 'skype' and i find it works well

I f there is anyone else in the Calerstown area would like to consult with me and compare notes- please pm me

[johnnyg]

Since the last message I've phoned a couple of times, as instructed, when the connection has been bad. As per usual, I've had no reply to my phone calls.

I've attached a couple of plots which show how the quality varies. The red plots show the percentage of packets being dropped. The green trace shows when things are so bad I can't get beyond the leinster broadband gateway address.

From the first plot (plot.png) it does look like something was done around November 7th and things have been a little better since then. However, as you can see from the second plot (recent.png) things are still really bad at times -- this afternoon there was a period of a couple of hours when up to 60% of packets were being dropped.

I'm still waiting for Callidus to come and install their service -- I will have to chase them up next week.

John

[mickor]

Currently using this service,
My upload speeds before christmas have been a crawling 2.4Kbps and has never gone above around 80kbps and download has never been faster than 490kbps. I sent a email about the upload speeds of 2.4 kbps before christmas and ....no reply...,and guess what .. the broadband has been down all over christmas for the past week or so and is still down - currently using eircom dialup and still paying for LB,sent a email to them tonight so i'll wait'nsee!,keep u posted

[paulclane]

I presume that you did all the usual diagnostics, such as rebooting the router etc. I noticed that Allen1 seemed to be trouble. Can you ping anything? (try start, run, type "cmd" then "ping 159.134.237.3"). It may be a DNS problem. Did you ring them? Emailing doesn't seem urgent enough.

If I didn't have broadband over Christmas I'd go absolutely ballistic!! Lucky for me though is that the service has been fantastic over the last week, the fastest speeds in a long time, with 2.6Mb download and 1.8Mb upload, so I'm very happy. If you, and lots of other people, can't access the service, then there is much less contention for me.

It just shows what the service is capable of if there was a better backhaul. Quality of service is only 85%, but that's the best I've seen from LBB for ages, with a roundtrip of 84ms. Normally when it get over contended the round trip speed slows way way down.

[mickor]

back up again , im getting around 390kbps download and 80 kbps upload, hopefully it'll stay up

[paulclane]

Check out the attached picture.

If I got this kind of service everyday I would be in heaven. Considering that Leinster Broadband only quote a 1Mb up/down service I think that 2.7Mb down and an incredible 6.2Mb upload is fantastic. Unfortunately, I tested at around 8am when very few other people are on, and now it's back to it's normal evening 1Mb down and miserly 344Kb upload.

[johnnyg]

I'm still suffering on-going issues with dropped packets.

However, the last few days things have been worse than usual, with the link dropping 100% of packets at times.

This afternoon was particularly bad. For a while I couldn't reach the LB gateway. Eventually, it came back and no packets were being dropped -- but I couldn't see beyond the gateway.

I'm guessing they were working on the network -- nice of them to let their customers know.

As usual, phone calls going through to voice mail and never replied to.

Hoping to switch to Callidus -- but they are taking forever to come and do the install

John