How I got on with six weeks of UPC's 100Mbs broadband service

For almost two months, I have had the holy grail of broadband services in Ireland: UPC's 100 megabits-per-second (Mbs) Fibre Power package.

As the trial period comes to a close, I can only say that most of the time, the service delivered what it said on the tin.

That's right: "most of the time". For, even though I achieved blazing hot speeds of up to 108Mbs (I've heard of others getting up to 120Mbs), the service sometimes played up a little. As in, occasionally cut out for no good reason. In fairness, few broadband services are perfect all of the time, so the occasional service interruption can be overlooked: I'm willing to give UPC the benefit of the doubt.

I did observe that the speed and signal strength fell off dramatically, if I was using the service over wi-fi. In the same room, the laptop clocked 60Mbs, a 40% fall-off (with about 5Mbs upload speeds). But two rooms away (about six yards), that fell to 30Mbs. Don't get me wrong; 30Mbs is a great broadband connection. But it's a long way off 100Mbs. In fairness to UPC, broadband speeds always fall off a little over wi-fi. To me, 70 per cent seems like a lot, though.

By comparison, my current broadband service terminates in the same room as the UPC package. It is a 6Mbs service. But two rooms away, it clocks 3.5Mbs, a fall off of just 45% (and not 70%). And that's on a mature broadband service with several other people in the area also using the technology.

So what did I use the 100Mbs service for? Do I now have a library full of high definition films, downloaded in minutes from The Pirate Bay?

Nope. By and large, I used it for the same stuff I use my 6Mbs connection for. Uploading photos. Web-browsing. Some light streaming. You know, regular home stuff. This may show my impending stuck-in-a-routine, old-fartness. Or it may be indicative of what most people do: I'll let you decide that. But I would certainly struggle to make a strong argument for a broadband service much faster than the one I have at present. 

Granted, I am starting to download films from iTunes a bit more, but that's mostly in advance for trips away: it doesn't make a huge difference whether it takes 7 minutes or 27 minutes. And I do dip into Xbox Live a bit, too: the extra speed certainly helps for downloading games. But as they're not really much cheaper than buying the boxed game, and I can't trade in a digital download, I don't generally choose new release downloads over DVDs.

Perhaps if there were a lot more mass-market TV or movie downloading services online I'd get real value out of 100Mbs. For example, I'd certainly go for a HD film-on-demand streaming service straight to my TV, which would take something in excess of 20Mbs to guarantee.

But without something like that, it's hard to see a pressing need for anything over 10Mbs. 

In conclusion, I can say that you'd want to be a fairly extreme downloader to really get your use out of this 100Mbs broadband service. Or have a really big family, all of whom use the service at the same time. Or use it as part of your small business. After all, €87.75 per month (well over €1,000 per year) is a lot of money for your broadband. (It's €80 per month if you also subscribe to a UPC television package; there's a 'reduced' €80 connection fee, too, when ordered online. UPC says that the service is now available to about a third of its installation base.)

Oh, and don't expect anything like 100Mbs if you're hooking up a wireless router: you'll be lucky to get close to half that speed.

 

Comments

[Lukejr]

I was interested to know what their 100Mb service was like, even a N wireless router would struggle to maintain 100Mb speeds. But great to see someone in Ireland providing ultra fast broadband in urban areas, it's also nice to see that the UPC network is capable of it with current network. Hopefully it'll put pressure on Eircom to upgrade their network in urban areas to at least VDSL technology, we can always dream.

[Thenext50k]

Adrian, you do realise that as you were connecting using wifi that this was what was dictating most of your throughput?
You could have had a 500Mb connection but if you then put a wifi router in the middle you create a bottleneck.
Even if you were using an 802.11-n router you could only have reached a theoretical maximum throughput speed of 70Mb.
Just saying like ;-)