Eircom Music Hub

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: December 9th, 2010 | 1 Comments

Yesterday Eircom released their new music streaming service, Eircom Music Hub, here in Ireland. There is not too many websites that allow for music streaming, at least not here in Ireland. If you are currently an Eircom customer then you can sign up with your account number and phone number and straight away start streaming music for free! The basic package for existing customers is free, it only allows for streaming, there are two other packages from €5.99 to €12.99, these include the extra benefit of being able to download so many songs per month, but I do not think it is worth paying because for €5.99 you still get the streaming from the free package and are only allowed 15 downloads, not a lot, but more than iTunes.

The second packages at €12.99 allows for 40 downloads and the free streaming service. In my opinion, if I was to use this service I wouldn't pay for the downloads, if I am with Eircom, which I am, then I am more than happy with the free streaming service. On the other side, if you are not an Eircom customer you can still use their new service, the packages begin at €6.99 for the unlimited streaming per month. Then €11.99 and €22.99 for the same packages I talked about for the current customers above.

So I signed up for the service yesterday when it came out and it is pretty good. It is currently in Beta so they are still working on it and at the moment although there is a lot of music, they are still adding more. Most of the artists I looked up only had one of their albums available, but it is not a bad start for the first day it is out! It will be interesting to see how this service turns out, it has the current charts on the front page and also show some playlists that other users have made, also you can see what others are listening to at the moment. I like that you can navigate to other pages and the song keeps playing. The design is nice too, when you scroll down the page the music player will always stick to the top so you can always get to the pause and volume controls if you need them.

There are a few things that it could benefit from, the first is that if you try to close the music hub's tab/window that it shows a message warning  you that the song will stop, this is just like the feature that GrooveShark has, people sometimes forget that the song will stop! Also if you could have some sort of desktop version it would also be nice or even a plugin for your browser so that you can control the player without having to go back to the Music Hub page, there is a plugin for Google chrome that someone made for GrooveShark and it works really well. So at the moment if I was to choose between the two, I would actually probably go for Eircom's service. Why? To be honest the interface is a million times better than GrooveShark, I find it easier to navigate and find what you are looking for. If you have an Eircom account and haven't tried it out yet, then head on over to the MusicHub!

A blast from the past!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: September 8th, 2010 | 0 Comments

It's not too long ago now since broadband became mainstream or at least here in Ireland. Although it was just a short time ago, it still seems strange to hear the old dial up tone that your computer used to make when connecting to the internet! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1AQcGGSec The good old 56k connection, and you would curse the life out of anyone who would dare pick up the phone while you were on the internet because you knew you would have to go through the whole process of connecting again. Back when I first joined Bebo I was still using dial-up! I remember trying to load a video that someone had on their profile page, it would take hours just to load a short 1 minute video. I think it was around the Summer of 2006 that I got broadband first in my house, the internet became a completely different place, I soon became very addicted to YouTube because I could actually watch videos without having to wait for them to load. Now though as fast as the internet is, it is still not fast enough. I have a 3mb connection in my house and apparently that is the fastest that can be pushed to my house, and it's not like I live very far from the closest exchange point! I think this day and age broadband should be going a lot faster than it is, I know that Eircom are rolling out fibre powered broadband and it will be available here in Louth between September and December of this year. So at least that will help but I still don't think it is fast enough. The new fibre broadband from eircom is going to be 8mb and apparently it should be a steady 8mb, it should never drop ridiculously low like down to 0.5mb which is not uncommon at the moment! So from 56k dial up where loading a page with one image in a minute was pushing it, we now have high speed broadband where we can load thousands of pictures, videos & music within seconds, that is a huge leap and as long as it continues the internet will only become a better and more useful (than it already is) place.

Eircom NGB or Imagine WiMax

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 28th, 2010 | 15 Comments

Currently my broadband provider is Eircom, I have tried them all from BT to Perlico and although Eircom's service is terribly slow, i found that the other Internet Service Providers (ISP) were just as bad, the main problem I have is to do with the download usage allowance, Perlico and BT both have set limits and enforce them, so as soon as I went over my limit I got an extremely high bill.

However, with Eircom even though they say they have a download limit, they do not enforce it, if I go over my limit nothing happens. This is why every time I switched to a different provider I ended up switching back to Eircom.

When I first heard about the new WiMax service that Imagine are rolling out across Ireland I decided that I would get it as soon as it becomes available in my area. My current broadband speed is 3mb (up to) and Imagine are offering 7mb (up to) at a cheaper price with unlimited usage allowance. It was the selling point here for me, I could get  a great boost in download speed for a cheaper price, why wouldn't I switch? Apparently the unlimited usage allowance of Imagine WiMax is not actually "Unlimited", I didn't expect it to be.

Imagine WiMax deem anything over 35gb a month to be excessive usage! That is a terrible cap to put on as excessive usage, that is just 5gb over my current cap with Eircom of 30gb which I do go over and do not get charged.

Since finding out about Imagine WiMax I found out that Eircom are also rolling out a new broadband service, they call it NGB (Next Generation Broadband). Eircom's NGB has a standard download speed of 8mb (up to) with unlimited usage allowance. All current 1mb, 3mb and 7mb users will be upgraded to the Eircom NGB for free! I looked up what Eircom actually deem to be fair usage and I have to agree it is a great cap, I definitely do not see myself going over it.

Eircom are setting their fair usage cap to 250gb a month :D . This download cap is only available on the highest end of the NGB packages, the high end NGB package costs about €10 more than my current broadband package. Also the maximum that Eircom will be charging for broadband is €50, so if you go really far over this cap, your bill will only run up to €50, no matter which NGB broadband package you are on :D .

I think for now, I will hold out and wait for the new Eircom service, the map on the Eircom NGB website says it should be available in my area between September and December of this year.