Wednesday 24 October 2007

O2 broadband - pros and cons

Quite a few people asked my to describe my O2 broadband user experience. Sure. I've been using O2 broadband for a month and I'm happy enough and I can not really complain about it though it's not perfect. Let me provide some data that I gathered using a small app I wrote. The test app was sending every 10 seconds a unique (to avoid caching) query to google and measured the response time.
The first test was running for 24 hours in my house which is located in Dublin 14. As you can see in most cases the response time was below 1 second though there ware a few periods when the response time exceeded 10, 15 or even 20 seconds. Fortunately, as I said there ware only a few of them and they lasted for around a minute.
Click on the picture to see the details.
 
Next I checked how the response time is dependent on the location in Dublin. I got on the Aircoach in Sandyford and went with my laptop to the Dublin Airport. The exact route can be found here. During the trip I applied the same procedure as the one described before. The results are again decent but they could be better.
Click on the picture to see the details.

In general I would recommend O2 broadband to people who:
  1. need to be able to connect to the Internet in nearly any spot in Ireland. If 3G is not available it falls back to GPRS.
  2. don't need great responsiveness at all times
  3. don't download/upload huge amount of data
  4. don't need to share their broadband and if they do they can dedicate a PC or laptop for that purpose
  5. as myself on the one hand don't appreciate how Eircom acts and try to avoid it but on the other hand need to have access to the Internet that works most of the time.
Hope this helps.

1 comment:

  1. Mozesz mi podeslac te swoja aplikacje na maila? Sprawdze co na to Eircom...

    Dzieki.

    ReplyDelete