yazzgoth.org

Recently I’ve moved to new house. And because I simply can’t be offline as I work over the net I’ve decided to give 3G a try.
I gave 3Ireland a chance at first. Unfortunately their “Up to 3.6Mb/s” is far from advertised. I didn’t expect it to reach speeds they advertise but something closer to 1Mb/s, but in practice I’ve got only 200-300Kb/s down and 50Kb/s up and the connection choked so often it wasn’t even funny. So the next day I have returned it and went to Vodafone.

Vodafone turned out to be more reliable in terms of stability and speed. It can fallback from 3G to GPRS if the signal gets too weak (and in some parts of my home it does). While on 3G I’m getting speeds of ~1Mb/s down and 400Kb/s up which is great, on GPRS it’s ~380Kb/s down and ~50-90Kb/s up.
Latency is not as bad as I’ve expected: 100-250ms for most servers.
So… Vodafone is nice but there’s a catch… 5GB traffic limit per month.. AND it’s aggregate traffic for upload and download!
With my day to day internet habits and work I’m using 300-1000MB each day, and no that’s without any P2P traffic.
As of yet Vodafone seemed unwilling to make any kind of deal to get a better package, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to pay hundreds euro per month for medicore broadband.
I guess I could always try out O2, and I may actually do that, because I’m sure I’ll resign from Vodafone Broadband before the 14days return warranty.

I’m trying to get a DSL at home, but that may take anything between few weeks and 3months. I guess I’ll be calling BT everyday to check when the installer will come and in the meantime I have to look for an office space with nice internet connection.