I’ve switched my home broadband from Eircom’s 3Mbps all-in-one package to
Magnet’s 10Mbps LLU package. It’s about a tenner a month cheaper, and significantly
faster of course.
The modem arrived last Friday, about 2 weeks after ordering; that night,
when I went to check my mail, I noticed that the DSL had gone down,
and indeed so had the phone. I was dreading a weekend without the
interwebs, it being 9pm on Friday night — but lo, when I plugged in the
Magnet router, it all came up perfectly first time!
Great instructions too. Extremely readable and quite comprehensible
for a reasonably non-techie person, I’d reckon. So far, they’ve provided
great service, too.
I’m not actually getting the full 10Mbps, unfortunately; it’s RADSL, and I’m only
getting 5Mbps when I test it. Just as well I didn’t pay the extra tenner
to get their 24Mbps package. Still, that’s a hell of a lot faster than
the sub-1Mbps speeds I’ve been getting from Eircom.
It’s hard to notice an effective difference when browsing though, as that kind
of traffic is dominated by latency effects rather than throughput.
I haven’t even tried their “PCTV” digital TV system; it seems a bit pointless
really, I have a networked PVR already, and anyway I doubt they support Linux.
One thing that’s wierd; when my wife attempts to view video on news.bbc.co.uk
on her Mac running Firefox, it stalls with the spinny “loading video” image,
and the status line claims that it’s downloading from “ad.doubleclick.net”.
This worked fine (of course) on Eircom. If I switch to my user account and use Firefox there, it works fine, too — possible difference being that I’m using
AdBlock Plus and she’s not. Something to do with the number of
simultaneous TCP connections to multiple hosts, maybe? Very odd anyway.
It’d be nice to get some time to sit down with tcpdump and figure this one
out… any suggestions?
Tags: consumer, dublin, eircom, ireland, magnet, switching
Eircom has been forced to implement “3 strikes and you’re out”, 
