ダニエルの冒険

The house is finally moved to a new ISP, after being with Eircom since their first residential ADSL offering back in about April 2003, if I’m remembering the year correctly.

We started on a 512/128 ADSL connection. That was crazy fast for the time, having been on 56k dialup until then. This was seeing about 48kbps go up to 512kbps on my downloads and it was nuts. Eventually we got upgraded to 3Mb/385kb. Eircom said we were going up to 7.6Mb/768kb but it didn’t happen until I called them three times. The first two times I called, their internal account management server was down and they couldn’t update my information to get me upgraded.

After finding out that we could be paying less every month for a better service, and that changing would have negligible downtime (a couple of hours), I called Magnet and started the move. It’s a 24Mb ADSL2+ package we’re on now but not getting the full speed. It tends to go between 12.5 and 17Mbps, depending on the mood of the line. I might end up downgrading to their 10Mbps connection altogether and save the money, seeing as the line’s not at its full potential.

Anyway, the good things:

• No download cap. (Just a fair use policy)
• Twice as fast as Eircom.
• Public IP addresses for each machine. This worried me at first but the firewall on the DSLAM keeps my netbios (windows file sharing) from being visible to the whole world.
• Competent and helpful tech support. Sure, it should be a given, but coming from eircom it’s a breath of fresh air.
• Magnet PCTV. It’s a new internet TV service which streams RTE1, 2, TV3, TG4, Bubble Hits, and a load of RTE and BBC radio to Mac/Windows machines through Magnet’s custom client.
• Ridiculously low pings, which stay low even when BitTorrent is running! Skype problems have disappeared, except for when the person I’m talking to has a bad connection.

The not so good:

• I do feel like I’ve lost some control over my network since I’m not running a firewall, DHCP server or gateway on my own network anymore. It’s nice to know that they’re looking after this so I don’t have to worry about it, but I don’t like having to call them to change the modem’s wireless or firewall settings. I could put a router between the modem and everything else, but to be honest, I’m liking the public IPs on everything.
• The phone line is VoIP over their modem so my dad’s in the process of rewiring everything to make sense in this new context. Phones will no longer work in a power outage, but as long as Magnet keeps its emergency generators working this shouldn’t be a problem.