 IFA Telecom Wireless BB
I live in N. Clare and we recently got our first BB offering through IFA Telecom. It is wireless BB (we are too far from the eircom exchange to dream about DSL).
For €40/month we get 1Mbps bi-directional with up to 40:1 contention.
I am not impressed, but have no choice at the moment.
Access seems to be intermittent - its generally on, but sometimes can be flakey - for example today is a bad day, I have just pinged the DNS server a number of times over the last hour, and only 41% of pings got a reply. Of those that succeeded 76% had a total round trip time of > 500mS while 39% were over 1 second!
When I am connected the Speedtest never shows download speeds of over 600kbps, and frequently it is in the range of 200-400 k. When I first joined it was soemtimes <20k!!!! But they managed to address that by moving me into a different contention pool
When I try to connect to my work VPN I can only get a conneciton about one time in five (luckily we have an alternative to VPN I can use which is normally succesful). When I am connected over VPN I can never get my Instant Messenger to sign on succesfully. I know these issues are related to the ISP as when even I connect over a public hotspot I dont have the problems.
Customer support is AWFUL! When I raise an issue they do not have a ticketing system so I have no reference. Typically I phone back a week or so later (having had no response) and noone can find any record of my issue. Last week was a red letter week as it was the first time anyone from IFA support ever phoned me back when promised (thats the first time in about 50calls over the last 4 months!!!!)
I am now looking for some easy to use applicaiton so that I can monitor my connection & collect stats on it over a period of time.  | 
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