Welcome to the 3 Experience...

You've been fed the same barrow load of BS that 3 have been feeding their customers, the media and their own staff for the last two weeks.

The problems are NOT fixed yet, it is still impossible to send email larger than a handful of bytes via SMTP - either via port 25 or SSL port 465 and it has nothing to do with blacklisted IPs.

The problem is that 3 don't actually understand what is wrong. If you don't know what the problem is - you can't hope to fix it; and 3 haven't got a clue.

I think El Reg has fallen for 3's smokescreen. From my point of view they have fixed nothing.

I have sporadic access to emails and FTP is not working which is a pain when trying to update a business website. Http access is still hit and miss and it often requires 2 to 3 clicks to open a webpage. This has consequences when submitting online forms etc. Speed is also an issue as the advertised 3.6 Mbps is totally unrealistic with actual speeds of 1.0Mbps available only in the dead of night with only sub dial up speeds at peak times. The net (pardon the pun) result of this is that I am forced to use dial up to update my websites. It definitely does not what it says on the tin.

To add insult to injury 3 have offered a free month but you have to call Mumbai to get it. When I called they refused to give me the free month claiming to know nothing about it despite it being on their website.

El Reg please don't fall for 3's PR smokescreen.

Despite the press releases this is not fixed by a long shot.

The best speed I have seen this week is 439 kb/s download which is an improvement from the 106 kb/s I got for month now.

But VPN still does not work, sending mail via smtp is not possible and attempts to download any larger file result in several broken download attempts that even a good download manager is quitting after a while.

Fixed? Not by a long shot.

... dealing with 3's customer service on this over the last few months has been nothing short of head-bangingly frustrating.

It took a huge complaint thread, letters to many different watchdog and consumer agencies and a piece on national radio to get this far.

It would be great if they could get it together though :)

No FTP for two weeks, unable to send email using Outlook for 2 weeks.

Friday 24th August 11.15am and still cannot FTP or send email in Outlook.

No point calling the Indians at 3 as they talk rubbish and don't understand English

Yes, they are crediting me a month subscription but all I want is to be able to do BASIC things with "3" send email and upload files!!!!

For anybody that wants the whole story, check here:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055115306&page=60

In short as of this Friday:

Speed is very sporadic and depending on time of day and location, far from the 95% coverage and speeds promissed

VPN works in some cells as pure PPTP only, add IPSEC and no VPN possible

SMTP is out of the question as most providers have blocked the IP used by 3's ISP as SPAM

Exchange is only possible via RCP over HTTP as direct exchange connections don't work (3 says Outlook won't work, but that is wrong, it works with RCP over HTTP just not as direct connection).

Netmeeting/Live Meeting still does not work

Web Suring works with different results depending on how sensetive your browser is and several refreshes of the page might be needed

Downloading works only if you use and agressive download manager and acceppt several hunderd retries and have a lot of time as it's slow on sub-dialup speeds

Peer to Peer (yes there are legal applications like Joost or SkyAnytime) don't work at all.

OnlineBanking etc. which uses https and forms you better don't try because submitting a form don't work.

In summary you pay for broadband and you get subdialup with limited surfing ability. Reminds me of Clearwire in Ireland.

So these appalling speeds I've been experiencing over the last 6-8 weeks are network-wide....well at least I'm not the only one. I frequently fire up www.speedtest.ie just to see and I'm always annoyed with the 200-300kbps results for what, theoretically, could be 3.6Mbit. After having experience of 3Ireland's paltry attempt at customer service (hi Raj, remember me?) I simply couldn't face reporting it (besides, most of the time the throughtput is just about enough to support RealAudio/radio - forget about graphic web pages, it's just not up to the task).

But wait, there's more: It ain't just 3IRELAND's bandwidth which sucks big ones. Right now I'm in the financial heart of London and speedtest.ie is reporting a download speed of 133Kbps - so 3UK is EVEN WORSE. You'd think that in the white-hot business-centric City of London they'd have decent service, but no. Gonna try in Dublin later but not till 4am will there be anything like the quality-of-service I actually pay for.

FTP finally works and I am getting about 1.8 mbps on a sustained 150 meg download. This is in Dublin city centre, so I'll see this evening how it works out the country.

I never had VPN problems but I guess that depends on what VPN client you are using.

I think it works pretty well, but I only have access to fixed wireless broadband at home so I guess my expectations are pretty low.

to get reliable broadband in rural Ireland - but not cheap. Go satellite. Fortunately work helps me pay for it, but: advertised downlink: 512K. Measured downlink: consistently 500K+. Advertised uplink: 128K. Measured uplink: consistently 100k+. Reliability: doesn't work when ESB fails :-( (haven't got a UPS - yet). Otherwise, in 8 months have experienced 20 minutes network outage. Latency can be distressing, but it all works - frequently I have VPN to office, colleagues on wired b/band complain VPN cuts off after a few hours, I usually connect up on a Friday evening and am still connected on Monday morning.