3 Ireland's broadband (nearly) back on its feet

Update: Just as 3 launches its £10 tariff in the UK, its service in Ireland has been suffering incompatibilities, slow speeds, and complaints, forcing the company to waive a month's subs as it struggles to get the service usable.

The service advertises speeds of up to 3.6Mb/sec, but users have been complaining that speeds between 100 and 200KB/sec are the most they can hope for, and even those only appear in short bursts separated by disconnects long enough to interrupt any download in progress.

With limited ADSL availability in the country, 3 Mobile Broadband is being sold as an alternative: "Perfect for home users with your desktop PC or Mac", as well as for laptop users on the move.

But as revealed by a recent service message, the company has had problems supporting FTP and VPN connections, as well as streaming services and NetMeeting, but more problematic is its inability to connect users to their (non web-based) email.

Part of the problem is how the mobile operator hides all its users behind a single internet (IP) address, in common with all the mobile operators.

This is good from a security viewpoint - it's impossible for users to be attacked over the internet. But it causes real problems for peer to peer applications, and if one user's malware-infected PC is sending SPAM then the whole customer-base can find themselves blacklisted.

We spoke to 3 Ireland who assure us that all the problems, baring the IP addressing, have been fixed*: so any readers still experiencing slow connections and application problems are welcome to get in touch.

Update:

We got the following statement from 3 Ireland on Friday 24 August: "Outlook is not working consistently due to to the IP addressing issue mention in the piece, we are looking to rectify this with an SMTP server installation and hope to have this fixed asap."®