Although it may not be much consolation if you are living in one of the areas of the country not served by broadband Internet providers, for most of us the choice of broadband service is actually becoming a complicated affair. Urban dwellers in most of the country can choose between four main technologies — DSL, wireless, satellite and cable — in descending order of availability.
The Minister for Communications, Dermot Ahern, recently claimed that there are now over 100,000 people using broadband and flat-rate Internet access services. Broadband accounts for 42,000 of those users and is growing fast — just 13,000 people were using high-speed Internet last October. Needless to say, the Minister is attributing the rise in usage to his attempts to drive down prices and increase competition, although to be fair, Ahern has spent less time paying lip service and more time pressurising the telcos than his predecessors. He believes that as prices drop more people will use the service; broadband adoption has been growing at 33 per cent a week since packages for under €40 a month have been launched.
While his investment in bringing broadband to the regions is laudable and should start paying off for end users in the coming year, one of the most useful initiatives Ahern has overseen is his department’s broadband information website at www.broadband.gov.ie. At the site, you can search for available broadband services in your area, hunt for the cheapest deal or register your interest in having broadband available in your locality.
Right flavour for you
Once you know what services are available to you, the challenge is choosing the right one for your requirements. There are four main technologies available: DSL, cable, wireless and satellite. DSL involves upgrading your existing phone line so it can handle digital traffic; Eircom and other providers refer to it as broadband but it is in fact just one of the available flavours. Cable runs over the same cable that provides your TV signal but it is only available in pockets around the country. Wireless uses microwaves to connect your PC to the Internet via an antenna on your roof. The most expensive option is satellite; it is also the only service available nationwide.
Price is clearly going to be a major factor in your choice — and not just the monthly subscription fee but also the installation costs and any penalty fees you may be liable for if you opt out before the end of the contract period (usually one year).
DIY Installation
With DSL you have two options regarding the installation: Do it yourself or get an engineer from your service provider. The DIY option is relatively straightforward. Firstly you attach DSL filters — small dongles — to all your existing phones and faxes in the house. Connect the supplied DSL modem or router, install the software on your PC and you should be sorted. You’ll pay anywhere between €80 and €99 to self install and in most cases you won’t even own the modem — the fee is just a charge so the service provider can set you up and start charging you on a monthly basis. If you are not technically inclined you can opt for an engineer install, which costs €199. There are also certain instances where your current telephone setup requires a visit from an engineer eg if you have a monitored alarm system such as Eircom Phonewatch. John McNeely, IT engineer and PC Live! contributor, has been using Eircom’s DSL service since last October — just two weeks after his local exchange had been enabled. The self install went fine; the only issue he had was he had to ring to get his username and password — an extra step that he felt could have been handled when he registered.
The installation for cable is relatively straightforward — all that’s needed is for an engineer to connect up a cable modem and install the relevant software. John Ohle, a photographer with Fennell’s Photography in Dublin, had NTL Broadband installed in his Walkinstown home about two years ago, long before most of the other broadband technologies were available for home users. He was waiting two weeks for the install but that was more to do with synching his schedule with that of the installer. NTL offers cable internet access on parts of its Dublin network and it is available from other providers in spots around the country, including Kilkenny and Waterford.
To avail of wireless or satellite, you’ll need a dish or satellite fixed to the outside of the premises, so you’ll have to get permission from your landlord if you’re not the owner. Cillian Hogan, a self employed IT security consultant who lives in a shared apartment in Dublin city centre, went with Irish Broadband for wireless access. At €149, he found the installation expensive but was impressed by the speed of setup (one hour) and short wait (one week). Hogan subscribes to a business level service from Irish Broadband. Between the four people in the apartment, they pay €20 a month to share a 1Mbit/s connection.
Dish access
Bodo Metscher, who owns his home technology firm, Technology Team, had a choice between ISDN (which he initially opted for) and satellite, as his premises was too far from his local exchange in Balbriggan to get DSL. Although the €149 fee with Digiweb is high compared to other technologies he gets unlimited downloads and it’s a significant saving over the €300 to €400 he was paying for ISDN each month. He now enjoys download speeds of 512k for downloads and 128k for uploads versus a top speed of 128k each way with dual channel ISDN.
When it comes to monthly charges for DSL there is quite a bit of variation in pricing for what is essentially the same product — all the providers buy the service from Eircom at wholesale rates and then resell it to you the consumer. The basic home user offering, as little as €29.99 from UTV Internet and €33.15 from IOL/Esat BT; the caveat is that you may find yourself signing up for their telephony services to get the best possible prices. Eircom, which has just reduced its monthly charge to €39.99, doesn’t have any such requirement — they probably assume you are a phone customer already — while Netsource, which charges €45 for its SOHO product ,doesn’t offer telephony services. A note of caution if you do decide to change your telephone provider at the same time: You won’t get the Eircom options discount unless you spend the full billing period with Eircom so the beginning of the month is the best time to transfer.
Perfect asymmetry
While DSL is certainly one of the cheaper options for broadband, cost shouldn’t be your only consideration. The flavour of DSL offered in Ireland is ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), so-called because the download speeds are much higher than the upload speeds; that’s currently 512Kbit/s download and 128Kbit/s for Irish customers. ADSL is offered because most users simply surf the Web — downloading multimedia heavy websites or watching streaming video requires large amounts of bandwidth, but the back transfer of a user’s mouse clicks and other responses needs relatively little bandwidth. The ADSL services in Ireland also reserve a portion of the available bandwidth for voice traffic so that you are able to make and receive phone calls while you are online without needing two lines.
Cable and satellite are also asymmetric technologies but wireless isn’t. For this reason if you are running a home business where you will be sending large amounts of data, you should probably consider a wireless service that gives you the same amount of downstream and upstream bandwidth.
Quality of service issues
If you read the fine print from any of the providers you’ll also see that even if a service is available in your area, there is no guarantee you will be able to receive it. This is mostly an issue with DSL and wireless. For DSL to run, your local exchange will have to be enabled but you’ll also need a good quality line into your house. Eircom only guarantees to deliver a dial tone and not a particular level of service so you could face having to upgrade your line for €120 if there’s a problem.
With wireless, you’ll need to have a line of sight from your premises to the nearest antenna — this can be an issue in an urban area if you are overlooked by high buildings. Cillian Hogan managed to speed things up by getting Irish Broadband to do a site survey and installation in the one visit.
Another important consideration is contention ratios. Basically what this means is the number of other users sharing the same broadband circuit. For a basic DSL service you can expect a contention ratio of 48:1 but you can bring this down to 24:1 if you go for one of the enhanced packages. John McNeely pays for an enhanced package to keep the 24:1 contention ratio — from the experience of friends in the UK who have been using DSL for a number of years he expects the quality of service to deteriorate at the lower levels as more users come online. On this service McNeely is very happy with the speeds he receives. ‘The speed is consistently above 50Kbits/sec, no matter what time of day I log on,’ he says.
Cable has a further Achilles heel in that it delivers shared bandwidth rather than dedicated local bandwidth. This means your performance is dependent on how may other subscribers in the area happen to be online at the same time. While all bandwidth on the Internet is shared in some sense and is dependent on the general levels of traffic, cable is particularly susceptible to this problem. John Ohle hasn’t found this to be a problem – particularly since the NTL service was recently upgraded from a 512Kbit/s download speed to 1Mbit/s. As a professional photographer, he regularly sends pictures to newspapers and magazines from home without having to fight through the traffic to get back to the office.
Stay secure
On a cable connection, you are basically sharing a LAN with the other broadband users in your neighbourhood. If you aren’t running any security software such as a firewall, your neighbours could potentially simply open their Network Neighbourhood and get access to your machine. Ohle doesn’t have any such concerns. He runs two firewalls (North Internet Security and Zone Alarm) on his laptop and has configured them to work in tandem.
Security should be a concern no matter what flavour of broadband you choose. You will have an always-on connection to the Internet, which makes you more attractive to hackers and also makes it easier for them to get onto your machine. Ask your broadband provider what security measures it provides — at the very least they should be able to provide you with a software-based firewall.
Beware the download cap
With all your new-found Internet capacity, it’s very easy to start downloading at will with little concern for file sizes. Beware though — many of the services come with a monthly download cap. For example, with Eircom’s Home Starter pack, which costs €39.99 a month, you can only download 4Gbyte a month and upload 1Gbyte a month before you start incurring extra costs. The caps may sound high but when you start taking advantage of music downloads, video streaming and all the other good stuff broadband can deliver, you’ll find you run into those limits very quickly. You can upgrade to an enhanced service with higher caps; for example, Home Starter Plus gives you 8Gbyte download and unlimited uploading but costs €54.45 a month. Other services such as Digiweb’s satellite service and Irish Broadband’s business services have no monthly limits. If you do opt for a service with a monthly cap, check that your provider gives access to some online tool so that you can check how much of your monthly allowance you have used — without one of these tools, costs can quickly spiral.
Some of the entry-level services don’t provide you with a fixed IP address which is how you are identified on the network. It may seem like an esoteric point but if you have a fixed IP address, it makes it much easier to solve any problems that should occur. John McNeely was plagued with his DSL line dropping and racked up support telephone bills of €30 in the first month. Sick of the continued problems he demanded a fixed IP address and hasn’t had any issues since.
Latency issues
Latency is also an important consideration. It is defined as the time it takes a packet of data to travel from your PC to its destination — together latency and bandwidth influence the speed and capacity of your connection. While latency is not an issue for most applications such as e-mail and web browsing, you will notice it using applications such as video conferencing or online gaming. Generally, DSL has the lowest latency of the available technologies. Wireless links can have a high latency, particularly if you are a long distance from the base antenna. Cillian Hogan hasn’t found this to be an issue — his flatmates are heavy users of online games — but he puts this down to his city centre location close to the antenna.
Given that your data has to be routed through an orbiting satellite, it’s not surprising that satellite broadband has one of the highest latencies. Bodo Metscher has found he can’t use video conferencing, although it is not an issue with instant messaging that he regularly uses to communicate with business contacts in the US and Asia.
Look online
While all the broadband users interviewed for this piece were pleased with the service they have chosen, such a sample could never be considered definitive. A quick survey of Internet discussion forums such as those on Boards.ie shows that all the services get complaints from time to time. The experiences of our interviewees should help you make the right selection to suit you. And take heart if you find yourself floundering in a sea of choices — it’s not that long ago that home users had none!
29/03/04
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