The National Broadband Scheme (NBS) is an initiative to bring usable Broadband to rural areas in Ireland where there was none before. It’s been up and running for a few years now and the mobile company 3 were awarded the contract to provide services under it. I’ve been on it for a couple of years now and it’s been fine for me up until recently when I started to go over my monthly bandwidth limit. The limit is not too bad at 25GB and should be fine for most people but I’m a web designer!
While moaning to 3 support about kicking me offline without notice, I happened to ask them if there was any way to up the monthly limit and was told they had another package I could switch to called 3 Broadband Pro which was only a little dearer per month at €30.49 but had a 60GB monthly limit, way more then the NBS deal and something even I should find it hard to go over. Turns out this package is one of the best available on the Irish market at the minute in terms of Data Limit V Price as you can see from this comparison.
So the moral of the story is that many people living in rural areas including me seem unaware that there are better broadband packages than their local NBS offering and that they aren’t tied to just *NBS. Contact your broadband provider today and see if you can get on something a little better.
Leon
*PS – Strangely, 3 told me that once I switched to 3 Broadband Pro, I couldn’t go back to NBS. Not sure why, maybe they were trying to scare me off. The fact that no-one seems to know you can upgrade from NBS maybe suggests that they don’t want people leaving it?
Reverb Studios Design 