Hi all,

Anyone got expierence with this. Is it good enough for LIVE?

Thanks

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If you go with Eircom 2mb connection you can bundle it with your phone bill and save loads!!!and you get a free wireless router too

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Eircom don't do broadband there. And for 30 quid I can get skype in and not pay any line rental. (Cheep skate me)

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There are two rules in life:
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The ping times/latency/lag will be what effects gaming. Broadband doesn't require that much bandwidth. In fact my brother used to play HL2 Deathmatch on 56K connection but the lag was horrible. Talking over 300ms most of the time and worse sometimes.

You should ask on broadband section of boards.ie. If you ask them to post ping times then some of them will do it for you. If you do a search there you should see some results aswell. Ideally you want sub 100ms ping times for gaming.

1Mbps should give you 1024/8 KB or 150KB/s download speed. Don't know how big downloads are from the market place but it would take a while to download anything really. Also beware of contention ratio. If you have 20:1 contention ratio then at around 5PM you'll be sharing your 150KB/s with 20 people and 150KB/20 gives you 7KB/s or dial up speeds.

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Thanks Brim. That was really helpful. Would ideally get at least 2Mb but at €60 for 6 months with digital tv the offer is almost to good to give up.

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There are two rules in life:
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Brim's answer is as good as you will get. With 1Mb at least you know you can always scale up if needs be.

With eircom etc not having BB in the area it might be your only choice...

On a 1mb connection you can download 100mb in 8 minutes

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Yeah you can start with 1Mb and then up it if you need it. The thing is with contention ratio you never know if it'll be that bad (7KB/s). In most cases it won't because not enough people can even get the broadband service in the first place to max out the contention ratio for everyone.

20:1 is the worst case scenario (other than maintenance or technical faults) so most of the time, it'll be better than that.


You should also note that unlimited bandwidth is generally (read always) subject to fair usage which most companies set at 10GB per month.

The last thing is most Irish broadband companies contracts contain illegal conditions that will never hold up in court so that if they are not providing the service you want, you can leave before minimum subscription period is up no matter what the contract says as this is Irish law. If you do run into problems, just post on Ireland Offline or Broadband section of boards.ie and there are some people that know pretty much everything on there and they'll help you out.

Also just to explain some of the abbreviations Mbps = Mega [b]bits[\b] per second. There are 8 bits in a byte so to get how many Kilobytes you'll get, you have to divide by 8.

Also 1 gigabyte of bandwidth is technically 1024MB but most companies will round this down to 1000MB so if you have 10GB bandwidth, you'll actually get 10 X 1000MB instead of 10 X 1024Mb so you loose 240MB or so that you think you have of bandwidth.

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Thanks brim for all the help. Found somewhere that with using Skype aswell I'll probably need more than 1Mb, plus with only 2gb of download its probaly not enough. so I think i'll just take the more expensive offer and be happier in the long run.

__________________
There are two rules in life:
Rule #1: There are no rules
Rule #2: Always obey rule number 1.