…could it be…
….might it be…
….possibly…

do I dare hold my breath? Could they be upgrading the exchange?

I think I was unfair to 3’s Punchestown’s network yesterday as looking at the modem spec for the phone in question it’s only capable of a max download of 384kbps.

Tom

Today, Tuesday (after the last of the Oxegenators had gone home), took the 3 phone and laptop to Punchestown where there’s a strong 3G signal. Managed to connect with download speeds around the 300 mark and uploads at 50Kbps. So, five time faster than ISDN for browsing, a little slower for uploads; but broadband it ain’t!!

Tom

As you said, why build up peoples’ hope…

Tom

I’m less than 100 metres from an exchange that was supposed to be upgraded in Sept 2007. I don’t even have ISDN available in the exchange (because it is due to go Broadband apparently). The village I live in has the distinction of having the lowest broadband penetration in the country (according to the CSO). The Dept of the Environment have an advance office less than 10 minutes walk from my house.

Competition is marvellous, but unfortunately many semi-rural areas are left struggling with just one provider. Solutions that fail due to “wrong type of rain” or “usage on a day of week with a ‘Y’ in it” are only workable for people if there is appropriate levels of customer support to wing it (such as immediately stopping billing if the service is out for more than a week).

Matters aren’t helped by coverage maps from providers that are wrong to the level of being a blatant lie. This works both ways… some providers maps show coverage where there isn’t and other are probably losing business by not having accurate or updated coverage maps. I’m peeved at the former camp and irritated by the latter.

The difficulty with getting planning permission for masts is also a challenge to the roll out of wireless services that is restricting coverage, from what I can see.

As soon as I get the rebate cheque from my ex-provider I’ll be touting around the one other provider in my area I haven’t gone with yet. Customer service, advance site survey, availability of other nodes to point to etc. will all be criteria in my decision.

Hope the weather changes for you soon Tom.

The appearance of a 2nd operator had two very positive effects; the sudden departure of a large percentage of disgruntled customers took a huge load of the existing network’s creaky infrastructure and, I’m guessing here, this sudden departure of paying customers prompted the original provider to send somebody in management on a Irish Times customer care course. The network still fails regularly (for the last few weeks, due to the “wrong type” of rain!) but at least customers can now get information on the fault and they also seem to have put engineers on-call at weekends. Competition, isn’t it marvellous?

Tom