NBI Fibre pre order

[Eagle]

You'll be so glad to be done with all the fiddling with antennas and switching providers and all the headaches that come with it It was a great learning experience I started off reading your blog and then came to the forum and have gathered alot of knowledge about 3G/4G/5G and how it works. I went through probably 20 different setups over the years never thought I'd ever get fibre nevermind 2 gigabit.  Still do check my phone for what bands it's using and speed testing out of habit and interest
wonder have they even bothered updating the islands frequencies yet 

Can't beat the consistency of the fibre. They also seemed to have fixed the weird speed drop at 8pm that was happening a good few months back. I remember my initial connection was well into 2025 but it got moved up. Hopefully they change yours again.  Out of curiosity I wonder would something like speedify increase the speed if I joined it with a fast 4G/5G connection just as an experiment


Sometimes you can't even fully utilise it because servers can't keep up over 1g 

[Seán]

I really look forward to even getting Starlink up and running.  The kit is arriving on Tuesday, however, it will probably be the weekend before we get it properly installed. 

I exported my Speedtest Desktop results, imported them into Calc, filtered them by Three and did a quick monthly average graph.  It looks like a stock market crash!  My monthly average peaked in April 2024 at 161Mbps, which is still less than 1/10th your average!  This month is turning out to be the slowest over the past 4 years, currently in the low 40s, fluctuating from about 100Mbps offpeak down to low single digits at times in the evenings.

From what I recall, Speedify's servers are mostly 1Gbps, so I would not both paying for Speedify to test as I have no doubt it will not deliver even those speeds.  Their Irish servers seem to be congested, particularly on the uplink, so I generally use their UK servers.  I am curious to test it with Starlink + Vodafone 4G to see whether it can provide a good upload speed as this is one weakness I have seen with speed tests people post from Starlink.  Personally I would be happy with the 10 to 20Mbps up to get by until NBI connects us, so I will be doing away with the 4G connections.  I will occasionally tinker using my phone's GoMo SIM or a Vodafone 4G prepay add-on, but cannot imagine using 4G as my main connection again once we're on Starlink, unless there is an outage.

[Eagle]

I spoke too soon about speeds being consistent! I am having 1500ish every time  now I wonder what's making it drop off this time almost feels like its being slightly limited. Best thing to do is probably complain to vodafone? Been like this all day, was fine for 99% of the time of having fibre. Other than 1 outage during the storm that was it. No real way to check the status of the network?

[Seán]

The ~1500Mbps figure seems more like a bottleneck at the ISP end, like a backhaul link is out.  1.5Gbps is however an unusual link rate as I would have expected it to drop to just below 1Gbps if it's something like an Ethernet link issue.  Assuming this did not happen right after a Windows update, change of virus checker, etc. it may be worth contacting Vodafone support.

Since setting up Starlink, I am currently getting between 100Mbps and 500Mbps down, typically in the 200 - 300's, which is plenty if it holds up until the NBI connects us.  The upload speed is lower than I would like at 6 to 20Mbps, mainly due to the fluctuating latency and packet loss (e.g. upload collisions) playing havoc with the way TCP works.  With some tweaking in Linux, I am able to get 20 to 50Mbps, occasionally hitting 60Mbps up, not that I plan moving to Linux just to upload faster  

[Eagle]

400 is great , big upgrade vs the mobile broadband stuff latency was always the thing I was wondering on starlink. As long as it's consistent is the main thing .
I feel like ever since the day they had the power off this internet has be slower. I'm still consistently getting about 1500 ish and the upload remains consistent at 227. I've like one or two random tests hit 2.2 or 1.9 but they are not repeatable , if I do another speed test right after it'll be 1500 again. I did contact support but they weren't much help and one person kept arguing with me saying I can't get 2gbps yet I have been since October. It's even over provisioned.  They are suppose to provide 90% of the speed so I'm not even getting that.

Likely a backhaul issue like you said? or potentially something else , almost feels limited