Christopher J. Buckley

Tonight I have finally had enough of Eclipse Internet! Here are the main problems i find:

• Traffic Shaping software deployed is not intuitive nor does it act appropriately: p2p/usenet/ftp are all bundled in as one bandwith class, meaning that you can only share 2mbit between all three services. This is wrong. You should be assigned 2mbit to p2p, 2mbit to usenet and so on. The situation now exists where even http speeds are terrible during the day/early evening only picking up past midnight! I write this post downloading at 240k/sec on a well seeded torrent at 3am. Why can I not download at 600k/sec (my maximum line speed) at 3am? It’s madness..!
  
  Don’t even get me started on VOIP using Eclipse’s traffic management solution - people are always complaining that my line is lossy, yet come midnight it all just works (when the traffic manager allows full bandwith). VOIP/SSL should always be prioritized! Someone sell them a real bandwith management solution!
• Your speeds are entirely dependant upon which gateway you connect to: If you are assigned a Gateway of 212.104.130.193 you will experience latency, packet loss, stalled http connections and increased traffic management. However, if you are lucky enough to be assigned to 82.153.1.4 your speeds are usually far in excess to those on the previous gateway. Why the inconsistency? Do Eclipse not know how to assign the corret amount of bandwith/traffic management equally to both gateway’s? Clearly not..!
• Constant loss of synch: I know, i know - this is a problem to do with my line attenuation (44dBm) and SNR rate. Well, I asked Eclipse to ask BTWholesale to set my SNR to 10dBm (it’s set by default to 6), has this been done? No! It’s such a simple request, but one which severely affects the reliability of my line, as BT appear set on squeezing out every last packet, unconcerned about reliability issues.
• http://eclipse.net.uk/ still doesn’t have a host header match: this is such a simple, yet intensely annoying, over-sight. I’ve asked them repeatedly to add a Host: header match for eclipse.net.uk, but no, I still have to type www. to reach their website/my customer pages.

A quick look at the forums on ADSLGuide confirm i’m not the only one experiencing the above traffic management problems!

So, i’m migrating to this ISP…

They appear to offer sensible prices, no botched traffic management solutions, appropriate bandwith levels: 30gb peak, 300gb off-peak, as well as a niche professional home user/business user base. I’ll report back after i’ve been migrated - hopefully asap!