Well it would seem that after a bit of persuasion we are following the other long term Eclipse customers and jumping ship. The only problem we have is that we have the server at home and sometimes can pass a huge amount of bandwidth as I pass huge backup files to and from my server when I am away at university. A little more googling found this forum posting on money-supermarket, it all appears to be praising Eclipse for great service, something I myself did almost three years ago but as you scroll down to the newer postings things change and the same complaints I quoted yesterday occur with more frequency.
An interesting thing to note however is that ping latency usually, even when it appears that the connection is being restricted, often never reach higher than 80ms. Also while the download speed, which should be around 3Mbit (on an 8Mbit connection almost three miles from the exchange) drops to the 56k speeds its been doing recently, the upstream rate has stayed at a constant 550Kbit (See graph above). If there where a fault on the line or as several people have stated too much strain on the copper wire I would be seeing correlation between the upstream and the downstream, something that the above graph obviously shows as not happening. Please note that the spikes in speed are from tests ran during early morning 1am to 6am, speed tests where ran using the thinkbroadband.com speed test tool.
As I write this the connection speed appears to be ok and I’m getting a constant 3Mbit connection at the moment, if you google for any broadband package your bound to find some chaff in with the wheat and it could just be that eclipse had a bad few days. However I shall continue to monitor the connection and post a further update is one is needed.
demon had a huge outage last night… i contacted them this morning, and was told that ‘things were being sorted’… checked a few of the ‘speed testers’ this evening and things seem to be a lot better… also, for the record, my eclipse account at my slough studio is faster than ever today!
Nice one, while eclipse has a poor record for home customers their business customers give them a lot of praise. This is probably because their business model is likely to be based more around the business user rather than the home user. I can’t complain about eclipse so far as their line quality is for hosting, this website has been hosted at home using their broadband connection with solid ip for a good five years and in that time I have had 98% uptime, not too bad for a home hosting set up. Even when I had the downstream slowdown port 80 traffic was getting through unperturbed and the upstream remained a constant 550KBit.