Gobán Saor » eadestown

Trying out Vodafone’s 3G service.

Tom Gleeson — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:36:29 +0000

For over a week this month our local OmniTel wireless broadband was out of action (the 3rd major interruption of service in the last year). As usual I had to revert back to my 64Kbps ISDN line which is not as bad as analogue dial-up but it’s still a shock to the system! Being within 3Km of a telephone exchange which is due to be broadband enabled we should eventually have a more reliable alternative. A 3g mobile signal would also be an alternative but alas our local Vodafone signal is still GPRS only (and O2′s signal is non existent); living in the countryside can be idyllic but it has its drawbacks.

Nevertheless, my wife’s new Nokia n70 is 3G enabled, and as we were visiting a 3g enabled area this bank holiday weekend, I decided to install the N70′s modem drivers on my laptop to try it out. Two hours later, I eventually got it to work, I pity any non-technical person who attempts to set it up. The Nokia PCSuite installed OK but when the Modem was detected on the USB port the drivers failed with a “Windows could not load installer for modem. Contact the hardware vendor” error.

Likewise, when I attempted to un-install existing Bluetooth / GPRS modems I use with my own Sony Ericsson in case a conflict was the cause of the problem I got the same error but this time with a message saying Windows 2000 couldn’t remove the drivers (I’m on XP SP2 !!).

Eventually I discovered I was missing a mdminst.dll from my windows/system32 folder, took a copy for another Dell laptop, REGSVR32′d it ( getting the message “The module ‘c:\windows\system32\mdminst.dll’ was loaded, but the entry-point DllRegisterServer was not found.”) and , hey presto, it worked. Why was I missing the dll? I guess I’ll never know but thanks to this www.driverguide.com thread for pointing me in the right direction.

The modem connected with a speed of 460.8Kbps, but my actual download speed was about half that with an upload speed in the mid 50s. Well ahead of ISDN download speeds and much cheaper (taking into account ISDN has a monthly fixed charge AND is charged by the minute ,while 3G is traffic based). So for those of you in a 3G area, if you still depend on ISDN for either backup or for your main internet service, throw it out and replace it with either a USB modem, router or even a member of your family’s mobile; don’t you just love having alternatives!

Rathmore Exchange to be broadband enabled…

Tom Gleeson — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:30:59 +0000

For the last year and half I’ve been connecting to the internet via a wireless service provided by a local firm Torque Internet (recently taken over by Callidus Telecom). While the service has its ups and downs (the downs sometimes lasting 2 or 3 days at a time!) it’s a huge improvement on my previous ISDN based service (which was both expensive and slow – not as slow as dial-up admittedly).

Due to the unreliability of the service I still maintain my ISDN line and I revert back to it at least once a month; I find if the network goes down on a Friday afternoon it will not be fixed until Monday morning. Here in Eadestown we really could do with a more reliable broadband service but of course other than the afore mentioned ISDN and various Satellite based services (don’t go there – ask any rural school!!) the choices are limited as the local exchange is not ADSL enabled and the mobile phone companies have not yet rolled out 3G in the area. But hey, there’s light at the end of the tunnel as Eircom (the former state monopoly and now privately owned near-monopoly telecoms’ provider) has announced the enabling of a further 319 – mainly rural – exchanges over the next two years and Rathmore, Co. Kildare is on the list. Yipee….

UPDATE:

Of late the service from Callidus has been much more reliable, even to the extent that when the Grange Hill relay went down on the Friday afternoon before a long-weekend, it was back up and working by Saturday morning, in the past we would have waited until the following Tuesday afternoon for the service to be restored.

UPDATE: Jan 2008

I spoke too soon, since last summer the Omnitel (I know, another name change) service in Eadestown has taken a turn for the worst. Not only have we had 3 major outages last year (one lasting more than a week), the new year looks like continuing the trend (down since last Wednesday, now Monday 14th). Also, the 172.19.20.1 transmitter (aka Fr. Ryan’s) is either massively over-subscribed or faulty (high latency >500ms, lots of timeouts at peak times), I’m going with over-subscribed. At this sort of latency, satellite is starting to look like a viable alternative.

As I tend to get hits on this post during such downtimes driven by Google searches on either Omnitel, Callidus or Torque, here’s their support telephone number: (01) 8263546.

Update: Sunday Feb 02 2009

Gone again, four days and counting, this time the Grange Hill node was knocked out of action by last Wednesday nights storm. No point ringing as the help line (3) no longer answers, I managed to get some information by dialing 4 for accounts, but by Friday afternoon that and the free phone sales number were ringing out! What a shower, I suppose they could be gone out of business but I suspect they had simply all gone home or gone down the pub. Thankfully I still have my ISDN line.

5 Newtown Grove, Eadestown, Co. Kildare

Tom Gleeson — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 11:38:28 +0000

Link to Eadestown and District website …