VDSL Coverage (again)

[scarbunny]

On 29/09/2017 at 9:46 PM, somewhatdamaged said:

With regards to the 4G stuff, my boss was getting around 28Mb on his WiManx connection, and said it was sometimes dropping down to below 9 in the evenings.  He has four kids, each with Xbox One or PC, and then you add in Netflix etc.  He's had the 4G router for a couple of weeks and said he has been absolutely blown away by how good it is.  Says averages around 35 down and 10 up.  All for a good value £25 a month.  Truly unlimited too, as he stressed to them about how much bandwidth his kids use and said there couldn't be any limits

I've had a much less positive experience than this. 

Ignoring the abysmal service in store to sign up that left me sat for over an hour waiting to be seen.  First day I got it set up was getting 28ish down 8 up which seemed fine, better than the, at best, 9 I get from Wi-Manx, but the second day I was down to 6 with pings near 200 and that's where it stayed all weekend.  PvP matchmaking on Destiny 2 was taking 15-20 minutes on Friday night and on Saturday morning it threw up a "Strict NAT" error so put it in a DMZ to see if it was restricted ports issue, still had a "Strict NAT" but also with the Xbox warning of a "Double NAT" nothing I could do would open it up, console network checks weren't completing just a pain so it seems there is a Carrier Grade NAT to contend with as well.  Random webpages wouldn't load, other would load slowly, videos would buffer indefinitely and just generally unreliable.  So plugged the Wi-Manx router back in "Open NAT", network tests completing with no errors, matchmaking back to a few minutes at most and no more hanging pages.

I'm hugely disappointed with the service, I was looking forward to binning off Manx Telecom's extortionate line rental and not having to wait for them to upgrade the lines so I can get a reasonable connect speed despite living on a new estate.  But I'll be dropping the router back in store under the 30 day trial as I would rather have a reliable fast enough service than an unreliable faster, sometimes, service.

Obviously its massively dependant on location and everyone's experience will be different and if it wasn't for the 30 day trial I never would have bothered so I'm grateful for that.