I am the Head of Product for SIRO, AMA about broadband in Ireland (again!)

28 comments

1. Any idea if full fibre will be coming to Virginia, County Cavan anytime soon.

2. I’m interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber optic T1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that’s compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?

3. I use the service and I am very happy with it and I don’t recall an outage at all in the 18 months I have it.

   Why do some operators don’t offer the 1gb service?

   How future proof is the network, what’s the max speed you can offer if needed?

4. Can you confirm if SIRO does in fact have a “build team” or are they mythical? There doesn’t seem to be any way to contact them.

   I’ve been waiting 14 months (Aug 2022) for the “build team” to move a box on the side of my house 30cm away from a powerline so the Actavo installer is legally allowed to carry out my install. The build team have in the past marked the job as done but never actually came out and done anything, so the entire process has to be started again and I go to the back of the line. 14 months is a long time.

5. I’ve noticed that often there can be blackspots in the towns that are covered by SIRO.

   In my own locaity there is (excluding a handful of housing) an entire estate that isn’t serviced despite the rest of the town being covered.

   What are the kind of complications that can cause this kind of issue, and is this something that SIRO is looking to resolve?

6. Why are maintenance works by SIRO carried out in the middle of the day, often from 9am until 4pm?

7. when will siro offer 2gigabit (non commerical) packages like openeir and virginmedia?

8. In three different houses, with three different providers (not concurrent), my internet speeds started off great but dwindle to about 25% of initial speeds after a couple of months. All three were FTTH and guaranteed speeds of between 500mb to 1gb down and 100mb to 200mb up, but after 3 or 4 months, each one would show 250mb down and 10mb to 20mb up. I called one of the providers about this and sure enough it went back to to initial speeds but again after a few months would reduce by about 75%. With my tinfoil hat on, it looks like the provider is intentionally throttling bandwidth slowly on the sly and most users would never track and notice the speeds reducing.

   What might be the cause of this and is there any justifiable reason for providers to do so intentionally?

   Thanks for popping by, I’m guessing this is going to be quite an eye opening AMA.

9. How come new estates aren’t connected up as the houses are handed over to the buyer? In a big estate in Dublin and we have all the conduits to the cabinets but no fibre laid in them. Moved in 2022 and the earliest estimate for connection is 2026 which is just crazy. Have to go with virgin as they were the only company willing to run their own line to get use something.

10. With FTTH becoming more common, where do you reckon speeds could end up in the next few years? Or do you think providers will stall on speed increases until 2gbps is more mainstream?

11. I live in an apartment block in fairly central dublin but can’t get anything better than ADSL. Is this likely to eventually be rectified by SIRO or is there some building owned infrastructure after the cabinet that limits the ability to deliver fibre to the home in such a case.

12. I’m in a fairly new estate.

    Thankfully we have siro.

    Just wondering when 2GB will be made available.

13. Can you stop doing 8 hour maintenance windows during business hours? Do you not realise that people are actually trying to work from home these days!

14. There doesn’t seem to be plans for my address, dublin cuty centre, as we have it good I imagine. However I am unable to change provider as I’m told virgin own the line, will that ever change? Basically at the whims of a single company. My rural parents have massively benefitted from this so thank you

15. When will housing estates in small villages with “adequate” broadband be getting faster broadband?

16. No questions, but thank you! Apart from couple specific operator issues, it has been a smooth sailing since ~2018.

17. I’d like for SIRO to publicly state why don’t offer 200Mbit/s upload on their 2Gig Lightstream product, unlike both OpenEir and NBI.

    – the lack of product parity makes selling annoying
    – customers moving from 1 operator to another get confused
    – SIRO look like ‘dicks’ for not providing the better upload
    – I’d like to see a 1Gig down, 250Mbit/s up LightPulse product. I think that’d sell like hot cakes.

18. The rollout plan states Swords has been rolled out however I am unable to get any siro service. I enquiried about this and was told the issue is my estate has ‘direct buried ducting’ which makes siro line addition impossible. Are there any plans to overcome this obstacle? How would you even go about solving this? Is there anything I could do?

    (I’m currently getting shafted by Virgin, the only provider able to give me gigabit speeds. I am eager to be paying less than half the cost for the same speeds!)

19. Where can I see the rollout plan for SIRO? When are you coming to Dublin city centre? How does this differ from openeir (where the map and eircode checker says is available in my apartment, yet Virgin are the only provider who offer broadband above 100 Mbps)

20. Will SIRO ever consider not requiring PPPoE? Many routers/firewalls struggle with it once you go about about 1.5Gb/s connection. On NBI and OpenEir it is not mandatory.

21. Do penguins have knees?

22. I don’t live in Ireland anymore but I’ve always been really interested in SIRO since I first heard of it shortly after I left the country. At the moment I’m having problems with CityFibre, in England, who couldn’t organize a piss up in a brewery – excuse the language. SIRO, in comparison to CityFibre, have always been really proactive and seamless in their rollout, based on the marketing and update emails I regularly receive.

    What equipment is involved in the infrastructure at the house side? I presume you install an ONT which then, naturally, connects to a bog standard consumer router.

    I have a Mikrotik CCR2116 router, with 4 SFP+ cages, for my home network. Now obviously this would void any support as it’s completely understandable that support teams can’t actively support hardware they’re unfamiliar with, but would SIRO’s infrastructure allow me to bypass the ONT and connect directly to my router?

    A limiting factor with standard ethernet is speed compatibility on the port itself where some manufacturers are now rolling out 2.5Gb ports, whereas if you already have an SFP+ capable device then your network can naturally scale to the upper speed limit.

23. How is it that I pay for 500 up 500 down fibre and yet I have NEVER seen those speeds despite router being upgraded , landline checked and had multiple engineers out only to tell me “it looks fine” , maximum speed I ever see is about 100 down 50 up with only the TV connected and a single PC.

24. Can you put a line up my road in south Tipp? It’s been promised for years.

25. Why can’t i have 1Gb/s up/down?

    I work from home and it would be a game changer. I think digiweb offered it years ago but nobody offers more than 100 up any more it seems.

26. Hi – I have a ping of 15 when gaming and I am unhappy. Can you bring it down to 1?

27. SIRO team told me we’d have fibre at my address in Q4. Was this lies to keep us happy or are these predictions usually true?

28. Switched from virgin media to Siro. it’s been great.