Eclipse Broadband (merged)

wolfman

Anyone make sense of these?

Evolution Option 1 is £14.99 for an 8mb connection and unlimited downloads (subject to fair usage). The only difference between packages is with regards to contention. I know it can be difficult to calculate contention as it varies, but has anyone had expereince with Evolution option 1 or 2?

The packages look great, but with regards to something like Optoin 1, the "Classic" contention leaves a few doubts.

lellie

There's a free 1 month trial if migrating.. give it a go?

ioscorpio

I use Eclipse broadband via my company, a little while ago the service was running really slow and the connection kept dropping off, but it seems OK again now. There was a thread on here complaining about it.

martino360

Hi there,
I have just switched from Eclipse flex500 to Eclipse evolution option 1, starting 24 hours ago. I have made various speed tests over the last day - download seems to be capped at around 430Kbs (50K/sec), which is a reduction of flex 500 which would go upto around 600Kbs on normal and 1000kbs with flexing. So i am very disappointed so far. The upload appears to be higher at 340 kbs compared to 200 with Flex500 but thats only from ASDL_GUIDE test, not sustained.
I was going to change to Tiscali's 1MB+ Unlimited service at £15/month but thought i would try this first as it means no need to chage email accounts.

When asked Eclipse staff would not tell me how the contention/speed was apportioned to differentiate their 4 option levels of service. I can only assume they are deliberately making the option 1 service lousy so people will go for the more expensive options.

Of course it _may_ be my connection will improve after a running in period. I will report back!

Anyone have experience of the £15 Tiscali service?

Martin

espresso

This is what I was told, when I equired about the new Evolution Options.

"Dear Customer,

Thank you for your enquiry regarding our service.
With regards to the new adsl max service we no longer have contention ratios as the original was based on exchange contention where as now it is based on network bandwidth sharing so depending on what package you go for will give you a better network share but its near impossible to specificaly quantify your share.
Allthough the packages we have created are aimed at specific users ie
Surfing,e-mailing £ 14.99
Downloading surfing e-mailing online gaming £29.99
The network share we offer is never any higher than the original 50:1 so it can only get better in depending which package you go for.

I hope this information helps."

peoplesrepublican

Here's what I got this morning (I asked about contention rates):

Eclipse has introduced a new structure of broadband packages based on performance. This is very different to the old ‘contention ratio’ method, which is no longer used by the industry for 8Mbps services. Therefore, we are unable to give a specific ratio figure as this will vary from minute to minute depending on the number of people using our network.
The way that the performance system works is that if there are lots of people using our network then anyone who is on one of our £18.99 packages will have priority over our £14.99 customers. Likewise, our £24.99 customers will have priority over the £14.99 and £18.99 customers – and so on…
By offering these services, we are putting the performance decision in the hands of our customers. Therefore, if you absolutely must have the fastest possible service all the time, then you can opt for our top performing Evolution Option 4 (£29.99 per month) package.

martino360

that quote is interesting peoplerepublican.

However - they are still not being complete in thier explanation ( i asked them for the algorithm they use to calculate the share - they said that it was not possible).
Its not enough to say higher level users get priotity - imagine this:
a level 1 user wants 1mb of information at 512kbs, a level 4 user wants 100M at 8Mbs, does the level 4 user then take all the bandwidth until his download finishes? Without some limiting formula users may end up paying more and more to compete with themselves - now that is extremely cunning by eclipse - its like they have floated their bandwidth on the free market!! But heres a thought - if we all go for level 1, on their explanation we will then all get the top service for a fraction of the price!!!!

I am not convinced though - my internet speed limit seems to be very stable since the change - never more than 50KBs at ANY time - now that seems unlikely surely?

Martin

martino360

An update for you all:
my Evo option 1 connection is definitely running faster now. download rates of 80-110KB/s (approx 1Mbs), and as far as i am aware my line is max 1Mbs. So looks like a good service after all

hope that helps

Martin

Simon83

Been reading this forum and carious other reviews about eclipse....

Anyone with them here? are you getting good speeds? good connection?

I have read that people experiance very slow speeds??

Bollards

Simon83 wrote:

Been reading this forum and carious other reviews about eclipse....

Anyone with them here? are you getting good speeds? good connection?

I have read that people experiance very slow speeds??

Hello, I've been with Eclipse since last September and we are very happy with them. Having said that, I think that they have got better over the last year and there are less issues with slow server response than there used to be. They have had some problems with the mail server of late, but I don't really use that so I'm not too worried. Their prices seem quite competetive. I would point out to you that I don't do any online gaming or stuff like that, just normal downloading and surfing.
HTH

Stompa

Might be worth looking and/or asking here:


http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=eclipse