LeviFig.net » Clix?? Anyone???

Clix?? Anyone???

Blogged on August 6, 2007 at 20:19

Internet service providers (ISPs) in Britain has been slammed by venerable consumer group Which?, which says the advertised broadband speed of “up to” 8Mbps is misleading when in reality customers can only achieved 2.7Mbps average connection speeds.

“It is shocking that internet service providers can advertise ever-increasing speeds that seem to bear little resemblance to what most people can achieve in reality,” Malcolm Coles, Which? editor told the BBC.

Retirado de: Consumer watchdog: ISPs mislead Britons over broadband speeds - TECH.BLORGE.com

Onde é que eu já vi isto??? E porque é que em Portugal é visto como “normal”?? </desabafo>

Tag(s):link, portugal, society, web

André said,

August 7, 2007 @ 08:28
Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Windows XP

Hi Levi,
unfortunately this is very true in the UK :( At home I am currently on Virgin which does not keep up with the promise. I know TalkTalk is very very far away from their promise - Many blogs are writing about this firm one of them is dedicated to talktalk http://talktalkhell.wordpress.com

The company I used to use at home and continue using at work is ZEN and they do rock. Maybe a little more expensive but you always get what you pay for http://www.zen.co.uk They do not lock you in to a contract and if you need support you can speak to an intelligent human.

Regards
André

Levi Figueira said,

August 7, 2007 @ 16:13
Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Windows XP

I hear ya!
I posted this above because we’re getting the same thing here in Portugal. The ISP I have at home currently (already working on the switch), Clix, promotes 2 packages: 12Mbps/512Mbps and 24Mbps/1Mbps. Although you get the full upload, for example, I’m syncing at 16Mbps… which is no a reason to complain (my complains are concerned with stability and QoS) but it’s not even close to the 24MBps advertised. And I had been syncing around 10-11Mbps for a while until I repeatedly called them until I got a competent helper that worked on the inside to move me to another “sync template”.

Oh well… I guess we see this everywhere. But I’m starting to get more worried because I already have IPTV and right now it takes away 4Mbps for each channel I watch. I’m switching to a new service that includes a STB with DVR capabilities allowing you PiP or recording of one channel while watching another, so I’ll be needing all the bandwidth I can get. And I still need a decent internet connection, right?

Bah..
Thank you for your comment ;)

Freelance Samurai said,

September 23, 2007 @ 10:41
Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.7 on Windows XP

early disclaimer: in no way I am defending any ISP.

Clix’s network is, as you might very well know, highly dependant of our old friend Portugal Telecom. Clix is using PT’s copper infrastructure, and that means that’s the little drama queen of a cable that goes from your local telecomunications central all the way to your house hold belongs to someone else other then the people/corp actually using it. So the deal with syncing bandwidth on dsl/copper based connections it that that little piece of copper is the most likely single point of failure for the whole deal. they are attached to buildings, posts on the street, sometimes it’s so strange no one has a damn idea what the hell is going on. you can live 10 feet from the central, but your copper wire goes down 2 blocks, turns, 1 block, turns again, 3 block, and turns again, 4 blocks, then climbs the apartment building to your household. it’s not unheard of.
Copper is also very prone to interference, even a little rattling (like lot’s of trucks passing near it) is enough for you to add noise (electrical noise) to your connection. humidity can infiltrate on the cable’s insulation and there you go, more noise. bad insulation and a power cable near by, again…noise. so the more noise you get, the more DSL errors you get, so you must apply filters to the line to reduce noise, but of course we are just talking electrical impulses on a copper wire, so canceling noise will inevitable cancel some good signal as well. the level of the line’s attenuation (that would be the filtering mechanism) is directly related to how much bandwidth you are able to get. So where does this leave you specifically: with a 16mbit profile you are dead close to the central, you might have some cooper issues, but there is no way a 3rd person (like clix or jazztel or oni) will be able to file a maintenance order regarding that copper wire. PT will tell them all to take it up the rear end, 16 Mbits profile is a great copper line for their standards, and if any ISP is using their lines at those levels of quality of service, they have nothing to complaint about. (realize that most (all?) ISPs are using someone else’s copper, supposedly to provide voice services, the fact that they dare to provide internet connection on lines leased for voice is really insane, and it’s something they are doing support free from the infrastructure provider).
If your syncing profile was changed to anything higher that probably means that you started getting a bit more noise on the line, which could account for the stability problems (the router receives garbage, doesn’t understand it, reboots as a fail-safe procedure, if you have far far far too many errors on the line when it comes back, chances are there will be no hand-shake and you will not get synced at all until the noise goes down for some reason and it’s able to do all the hand-shaking it’s supposed to be doing). What happened to you is a typical situation, in these typical times: people calling tech support with the lingering idea that they are evil for not giving you more bandwidth…it’s not about that, if you have service, may it be 2Mbits or 24Mbits the cost for the ISP is very likely the same (only thing I can think of is the central not being gigabit enabled, that could be troublesome if every single client was synced at 24Mbits, so there’s some investment there), you usually have the best profile you an have in that error/mbit ratio, touching that will very likely just make peace with the client (huhuu, more bandwidth) but deteriorate the connection further, now creating syncing problems.

/me wonders how you are liking Meo in comparison to SmarTV.

Clix’s publicity is a bit tricky and I can only accept it because I know that for as long an ISP is dependent of PT’s infrastructure there is no way in hell anyone but them can guarantee quality of serivce.

Levi Figueira said,

September 23, 2007 @ 18:47
Using Camino 1.5.1 on Mac OS X

WOW
Excellent post! Very informative! ;)

I agree with you when you say that any ISP is dependent on the copper lines they’re provided to work with, in the first place. And I agree that Clix have really suffered from this, in which we can perhaps accuse PT of “bad business practices”.

But at the same time, we have to agree that most work has been done by PT since ages ago, and they’ve invested a lot of money to provide their service in the first place, only then offer in wholesale mode. I still remember “Netfast”, Telepac’s ADSL, back when 256kbps costed nearly “30 contos” (150€ in nowadays). No other company had even come close to that kind of broadband… Not even “TV Cabo”, that came later on with their cable products.

But the point I’m making in this post is: If Clix can’t guarantee a certain speed level, they shouldn’t publicize the maximum theoretical speed, but the average speed. I understand this would be a bad “marketing stunt”, but they’d gain confidence from customers. Since their customer base grew drastically right on the first months when they came out, I don’t think that the advertised move from “16Mbps” to “24Mbps” really attracted that many new customers per se… And I’d like to see some stats on who actually has 24Mbps…

As to my personal switch, I was having way too many problems with the quality of my TV signal. And I had an average to good experience on the first days I had installed. Heck, even the first weeks…

I moved from that house (my parent’s, Porto) to my brother’s in Lisbon after having SmartTV activated for some weeks. All seemed good! I ran into some problems on my brother’s house (running SmartTV aswell) and they looked hardware related (they do bundle cheap hardware on their packs… At least Sapo sells Speedtouch hardware in their 25€ bundles… You’re better off just getting one from them! It seemed as if the SmartTV box froze way too often (not the modem/router). But I was barely ok with that… I did have other problems, but I’m guessing those where very specific so I’m guessing not everyone will run into those, making pointless to list them here. But at any rate, the problems I encountered on my parent’s SmartTV where… problematic!!! One thing is having a box freeze up once or more (much more on some days!), another is having a unstable service, with LOT’S of “hiccups” and horrible quality of service on the TV side… Having the signal reset over ten times during the first half of a soccer game is horrific! Not even mentioning the fact that we were without TV AT ALL for the whole month of June!!! After nearly ten phone calls with tech support, they acknowledged the problem and blamed it on an “overheating central”, and we just had to wait. Wait for what?? For summer to go by?? For them to spend some money on a decent ventilation?? Or for them to come up with a new excuse?? Pardon me if I’m too technical, but an “overheating central” is not a good excuse. I’d be embarrassed to even tell to any of my customers that they didn’t receive their work on time because my PC was “overheating”… Is that their problem?? NO! Besides, July comes along and with it June’s bill. Guess what? Full charge for SmartTV!!! That was the tip. Two days later I started searching for a new provider on my dad’s behalf. I went to live with them during July and August, just before moving to the US, and I took over the process. At this time, MEO comes along and it seemed interesting. BUt I was looking into moving back to Netcabo, with whom I had a contract before Clix, and never (NEVER!) had a problem. Same IP for 3 months, very low drop rates, high speeds (8mbps at the time… and that meant REALLY 8mbps = 1mb/s, unlike with ADSL connections and PPPoE overhead), excellent TV signal and speed, etc… But for some reason I wanted to try something new, and cheaper… and innovative! That’s where MEO plays along.
Despite the fact that the first PT store I went to informed that the service would be available for me, and when trying to subscribe on another PT store they informed that they were working on it, but it wasn’t yet available, I had a good impression of what the service would offer. And I’d get the argument I wanted (personally and… secretly!;)): another ADSL service, over the same copper lines… how will it compare with Clix!!!

I left home in between, having only time to experiment with Sapo 8mbps in the mean time, until the service was finally available.
When my dad told me 2 weeks ago, that they had the service installed, I was curious. And for first impressions, I asked my younger brother and sister (12 and 13, respectively). Their answers were: “Brutal!”, “We can pause it and replay!”, “We can record to watch later… we already did that with the last Sporting game, last wednesday!”. I immeditely asked about the quality of the signal… “AWESOME!”, “Amazing!”, “It doesn’t freeze like the other did!”. Pretty self explanatory, huh?? ;)

So, in short (yea, this turned out to be longer than I thought… sorry for putting you through!;)): the same copper, the same central…. DIFFERENT HARDWARE!!! And that’s my main argument against Clix: they’re using bad/cheap hardware OR… they’re not configuring it correctly!! And I know from a very close source (I won’t tell you who, or I… I mean *they* could be in trouble! ;)) that most of their hardware was bought on second hand from South Korean providers… when they moved to other brands and equipments!! :x

I rest my case! ;)

Again thanks for the input!
Keep it coming =)

Comment

Comment's RSS feed. · TrackBack URI

This public comment area allows for healthy discussion with both the author and other visitors on the above post's topic.
To keep this area clean and helpful, there are a few tips you're advised to follow:

Please stay on-topic and be clear in your comments.
Avoid posting links, as your comment may be considered as spam.
If you intend to post links, do so but posting to your own blog and trackbacking to this one.
Take into consideration that someone might be offended by your comment, so please take time to think over it.

Thank you for your participation.
Consider subscribing to this blog's RSS feed.