So the Geneva motorshow has shown some spectacular cars from hot hatches like the Honda Civic Tyre R to the supercar looks of the Maserati to challenge the Jag F-Type.

                                                                   Maserati Concept

However all of this has been negatively impacted , in my opinion, by the constent back and forth of manufactureres on who has the fastest Nurburgring Time...

Is anyone else sick of this constant need for manufactueres to wave their male members in a display of machoism in relation to "Ring" times?

While I agree the Nurburgring is a fine place to test drive a car with some of the most technical and challenging corners of any course and the potential for the weather to be different depending on the location on the track due to its 20832m length. However there is no ruling body in relation to the lap times at the Nurburgring, no official timing method and even debate about where the start and finish line is!! This along with the factors such as weather, track temperature, tyres, driver.... the list goes on; has a major effect on the validiy of the times.

If the above wasnt enought there have been many stories of manufacturers "tuning" their cars specifically for the "Ring" so as to get the best possible time, a particular journalist isn't allowed driver their cars after speaking out about it ;) This type of testing is not indecative of the final production car a customer can get. Its easy to make a car quick around a specific circuit but making it work around a variety of tracks, while also being usable on public roads is far more important and applicable to the end consumer.

So to end this ramble.... I am hoping that manufactures and the motoring community move away from this "Ring" time mentality and look at trying to find the best car in all situations. Plus if your gonna picka  track to get the best time around how about we pick Spa Francorchamps :)

Unlimited data but dial up speeds.... "Yes Please"!

For a while now I have been a customer with Three Ireland, on the All You Can Eat data plan @ €20.33 per month for sim only. As part of this I have 300 units for texts/calls and unlimited usage of data on my mobile.

One would thing that a plan with free all you can eat data would have a respectable level of performance to allow users to make use of the uncapped data!? Well one would think incorrectly... for the past number of months I have had the following ongoing issues with my HSPA+ (3G) internet connection with Three:

1. Download speeds that are <60kB/s in most areas of Dublin city
2. Constant disconnects from the 3G network 
3. DNS issues that cause intermittent internet connectivity issues
4. Inability to use my data plan for tethering to my laptop due to the above

The response from Three has been lack luster to say the least, whereby I have been told by tech support that they have made changes to my network profile. I have not been informed of what changes and these "updates" have only slightly increased the download speeds to ~1.5Mb/s (in certain areas), but the DNS issues and connectivity loss still remain.

Now a person could say that it is a phone issue (Galaxy Note 2) or the location that I am using the phone in and I wouldn't disagree with them if they did. So to eliminate this as the issue I placed a Vodafone Bill Pay sim in my phone to do a test against the Three sim. The results were shocking to say the least:

1. Vodafone provided  Download: 7.8Mb/s and Upload: 1.4Mb/s
2. Three provided        Download: 68kB/s   and  Upload: 2.1Mb/s

I am alos not sure how Three are providing a 4G network when their 3G network is clearly lacking. My presumption is that the Three Ireland data network is oversubscribed and that it cant deal with the number of users and contention on each of the towers is becoming an issue. There is no way to improve this at the consumer level without investing further in infrastructure and this might be one of the reasons that Three is looking to purchase 02. However as this has been blocked by the Telecoms Regulator at present I am not optimistic that the Three service is going to improve any time soon.

Thus I am now currently thinking of changing my provider to solve this issue as paying for a service I am not being provided is rather retarded, especially in a situation where using the "up to 7Mb/s" or the like is clearly not a valid reason from the results shown above!

I would be interested to hear back from people on their experience of the different mobile providers in Ireland and especially with the Three Ireland network.

I am back....

Well its been a very long time since my last post! This is due to work and a general lack of time up until now. However I have started to reasses my use of time and blogging has come back on the list of things to do :)

So with that out of the way this blog is going to be a electic mix of everything from Technology, Gaming, Cars, Science to even the odd Political POV. I do hope you will enjoy these ramblings and please let me know if you want me to cover anything in particular.

So keep an eye out for my first new post coming tomorrow...!!!