I have Eircom’s 1mb broadband package at home, and it’s been driving me absolutely mad recently. The connection is so unreliable, that trying to spend a chunk of hours working from home is pretty much impossible. I haven’t even bothered calling Eircom about the problem, because I know what the problem is. Our house is too far from the local exchange, resulting in what they call a long line issue. This means the signal is very week by the time it reaches us, and we therefore get cut off whenever there’s a heavy load on the line.
I worked at AOL broadband technical support for a while, and this was a common problem for rural customers. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution. The only thing the ISP can really do is try get the line upgraded, but I’m sure there’s a lot of expense in that and it probably isn’t worth their while doing it just to satisfy a handful of nagging customers.