Technically fibre came to the village last September, but when you have VDSL at 90Mbps, who needs fibre? Over the following months the speed kept dropping. 60M last week. And increasingly intermittent, suggesting a broken core; the last time it dropped below 20M I got the ladders out and repaired the joints on the post which got us back up to 90M.
Long story short I approached the operator Sosh to ask if they'd negotiate on price. They wanted 31€ for 300M. RED wanted 26€ for 500M with 2 months free and install of 39€. The 2 free months covered the install. It was a long and frustrating conversation with Sosh. They kept telling me fibre wasnt available, even though I knew 5 others with it. Sosh online mapping for house selection chose not to use the official postal addresses in the village and instead thought that using the plot number off the cadastral listing and the place name would be better. After all, everyone knows that information from when they bought their house. I offered to send them a screen shot of their map showing the house and the local fibre box. They told me to post it. Yep, in the 21st century an IT company didn't have an email address.
I terminated the conversation and signed up to RED. I was being lazy staying with Sosh, and part of me doubts they would price match for a worse speed! I should thank Sosh as RED had dropped their price to 25€ in previous 24 hours. This was Thursday. I booked the install for the following Monday. I got a call Saturday saying they were coming to install. They turned up, but their system showed that we already had fibre, and it was too late to pull a cable.
Monday comes around, and 2 hours later it was all done. I got outgoing phone calls immediately, but I had to wait until the following morning for incoming calls. 500M up/down. You also get 10G of cloud but it's too pitiful to use. I won't be using the email as I will probably be changing ISP again in the coming years and it's too much hassle to advise everyone of change of email. I'll stick with gmail.
Sosh have been helpful in cancelling the old contract. Their bill will be forwarded to RED!
13/7/24 Been playing with the router. It takes an amazing 20 mins to synchronise. 20 mins!!! I have an ONT + xDSL box that accepts a WAN. It looks like the ONT syncs every 10 mins and it needs 2 syncs before it connects. If you're lucky it will connect in 10 mins. Unlucky and you wait 20 mins. If you think that's bad, it takes around 2 hours for the VOIP in the box to reconnect.
See my next post for a UPS
On the plus side, repeated disconnects push the speed up. Currently got 920/417 4 ping and 7/13 latency.
