Great excitement in our house this morning with the arrival of UPC engineers to install fibre-optic broadband. They were very efficient and were in and out of the house in less than an hour. They connected the fibre cable to a co-axial cable which runs through the wall of our house - this is connected to a new modem in our office at the front of the house. As you can see in table below there is a stark difference between what Eircom were able to offer and what we now have from UPC.
Before (Eircom)
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After (UPC)
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But......
...they don't tell you when you order broadband that you can lose up to third of the speed over WiFi. I checked the speed on a laptop right beside the modem and sure enough it measured 74 Mbps - still impressive, but quite a drop over a few inches. The modem is at the front of our house, but 15 metres away at the back of the house the download speed drops to 34 Mbps. But much worse than this is the drop to 2.9 Mbps upstairs. I was not expecting this! So I'll be onto to UPC Tech Support for some advice on what to do, though I expect that this will mean extra cabling to move the modem closer to the centre of the house.
This also marks the end of our time as customers of Eircom. According to the UPC engineers today they have a full schedule and are very busy doing exactly what they did in our house - moving customers from Eircom to UPC. In the meantime, Eircom are sitting on their arses letting this happen - good luck with that business plan guys.
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