Eircom offer

flogen

just had a young lady at my house trying to sell Eircom bb to me, and i must say I'm leaning towards it more than i had been, but not totally swayed.

how good is it? what do you think of the dl cap?

Also, someone told me that theyre supposed to be dropping their monthly charge soon. suppose i sign up now, and in 2 months they knock €10 off their monthly charge, would i benefit from the price-drop or be forced to pay the price that was in place when the deal was made?

thanks

Flogen

ur-lord

if you sign up with eircom your asking trouble. its caped at 5 gb which you would download in a matter of days. this means if you download over this you have to pay by the mb!

captainpat

Flogen,
The only people who know the answer to your questions are employed by eircom, and not permitted to answer. All other answers you get will be opinions, based on people's experience of eircom. So, unless you have any reason to believe differently, expect the worst case. You will likely be right, but you will not be disappointed then.

Redshift

Originally posted by ur-lord
if you sign up with eircom your asking trouble. its caped at 5 gb which you would download in a matter of days. this means if you download over this you have to pay by the mb!

How do you know what he would download in a matter of Days? you're just speculating there, Nobody to date has ben charged for going over the CAP as far as I am aware and besides all of the other operators have the same clause or something the like it except netsource who will just cripple your connection instead. I have eircom myself and I am very happy with it, yes it's too expensive but it is as advertised and does what it's supposed to do well. From what I read IOL are also very good I'm not too sure on the price differance but I belive they have a larger cap. UTV are another provider that alot of people seem to be happy with but in their case you have to move your telephony service to them. Just weigh up your option look at all the packages available and decide which one meets your needs the best.

Dawg

I had a nice Australian lady call around last week giving me the whole sales pitch and most of it was pure rubbish.
She gave me a demo on her laptop showing Matrix Revolutions trailer in a tiny window saying how it was dvd quality. I asked how I could use the connection to watch these movies and was told it was simply a sample they were given
I explained the cap was far too low so she went on to say I could leave UTV and try Eircom for two months to see how it went and have no problems going back if I so wished, but still had to sign the 12 month contract as a matter of formality. Yeah right.

I wouldn't believe a word they told you, they just want their commission one way or the other.

Originally posted by Redshift
yes it's too expensive but it is as advertised and does what it's supposed to do well.

Although what they advertise on tv etc., and what the sales heads tell you when they call are totally different. Unless it is actually possible to watch dvd quality films over a 512kb connection that I have been missing out on, not to mention doing it without eating through a crappy cap..

dub45

I explained the cap was far too low so she went on to say I could leave UTV and try Eircom for two months

And was she going to arrange for UTV to release you (and all her other potential 'customers' )from your twelve month contract?

Did you happen to raise this point with her?

And do Eircom allow people to sign up for two months?

flogen

is iol decent?
i dont mean to turn this into yet another 'which is better' post, but iol is 5yoyos cheaper... she claimed they dont have as many good extras (like a firewall, but i already have one!), they have a better cap, although i heard that its upload and dowload and not just dl.....utv is certainly the best, but i wouldnt want to switch over my phone line

the thing is, im not sure if i would use more than 5gb a month... i might and then i might not. id much prefer to have a trial of it, a 1 month thing with no contract, see what i think and see if its worthwhile with a cap like 5gb. sadly, they say it HAS to be a 12 month or nothing.... i think that will only lose them custom, think of people who are really technophobic or computer illiterate..... they wont want to sign up to something for 1 year when they dont know what their getting for their money

Flogen

dub45

utv is certainly the best

Why do you say this?

BKtje

i wouldnt be too worried about the upload being included on your cap.
I've downloaded about 22 gigs thus far this month ad uploaded only 2. ive also uploded some large files so if i hadnt i doubt id have made a gig.

Unless you upload files to people (ie file sharing) then the upload being a part of the cap is really not worth much of a concern. Especially seeing as IOL's cap is 2(?) gigs more than than Eircoms.

However on who to choose i cant help you.

tuxy

the caps stated in this thread so far are wrong its 4 gb for eircom and 8 gb for iol

Dawg

Originally posted by dub45
And was she going to arrange for UTV to release you (and all her other potential 'customers' )from your twelve month contract?

Did you happen to raise this point with her?

And do Eircom allow people to sign up for two months?

No, the impression she was giving was that I could sign up with Eircom and see how I got on with the 4 gig cap. If I wasn't happy then I could simply change back again.
It was pure BS as I would still have to honour my contract with UTV and pay the year to them (presumably even if I had it disconnected), and I can only imagine what would happen after two months if I tried to get out of the Eircom contract based on what she told me.
She really couldn't believe it was possible to break 4 gig a month, I said 6 would be my minimum so she went off to call and find out how much that would cost. We were having a laugh about the whole thing thinking there was no way she would call back but 15 min later, back she came to tell me it was 3.6c per meg over the 4 gig (obviously she hadn't done the math to find out how much 6 gig a month downloading would cost me).

Serbian

Originally posted by Dawg
... but 15 min later, back she came to tell me it was 3.6c per meg over the 4 gig (obviously she hadn't done the math to find out how much 6 gig a month downloading would cost me).

I bet she had done the maths

Dawg

heh, I'm not even sure she knew how many meg made up a gig. If she did, then she was either very brave or very stupid coming back to tell me. I could have a cap 3/4 of what I currently have for only a little more than double what I pay now. Woohoo

mobby

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=126211


See what you can expect after you sign up bet you were never told about these charges .

LoGiE

I have Eircom RDSL and am very pleased with the service. I've only gone over the cap once(And NOT been charged). I'm just not interested in downloading poor quality films. I mostly download a couple of hundred mp3 and play games. For playing games online it's excellent with 20ms pings to English and irish servers. I might add I've had no downtime whatsoever in the 6 months that I've had the service.
This seems in contrast to the poor pings for IOL and slow downloads not to mention throttling and IBB I believe isnt great for pings.
Personally I'm glad I payed an extra €10 for getting a product that does exactly what is says on the tin. As a gamer its the best option after Esat business which is only available to a small number of people.
Just my 2 cents

logistic

Originally posted by flogen

utv is certainly the best, but i wouldnt want to switch over my phone line
Flogen

Why wouldnt you want to change over your phone line? Cause as far i know there call rates are cheaper.

fatherdougalmag

I'm currently weighing up UTV vs IOL. I'm already on UTV telephony so that doesn't really matter to me. There's only €2 in the difference between UTV and IOL so money's not really a factor. I'm only concerned with downloading, web, email and occasional XBox Live'ing. One of the posts above suggests (doesn't say with certainty) that the IOL cap applies to both up and download (i.e. 8GB shared between upload and download). This concerns me so I've just rattled a quick mail off to IOL sales to confirm. Re-reading their FAQ reveals that :

From the 1st October you will be entitled to free transfer of up to 8 Gigabytes of data in any given month

'Free transfer' - nice and vague. At least UTV explicitly state:

You will be entitled to download up to 8 Gigabytes of information in any given month

. Their per MB charge thereafter is also 1/2 IOL's. I'm a big BitTorrent fan and the upload can be fairly hefty sometimes.

tuxy

as far as i know it isnt the combined up and down
its you cant download more than 8 gb and you cant upload more than 8gb
the upload cap wont be a problem once u dont leave a p2p app running

fatherdougalmag

Thanks tuxx. BitTorrent is a file-sharing app of sorts so I am concerned about the upload. I'm not too concerned about an 8GB upload/8GB download free transfer limit but I'd be wary of a shared 8GB between upload and download. Still haven't heard anything back from either UTV or IOL ...

Davey Devil

Originally posted by LoGiE
This seems in contrast to the poor pings for IOL and slow downloads not to mention throttling

According to my IOL stats I have used their service for over 38000 minutes. During this time the service has been brilliant for 99% of the time, one day the downloads were slow (but they were probably doing upgrades or something). The pings are great for me have had no problems there at all. I'd like to know where you got your information about IOL is this from your own experiences?

flogen

what is the guarenteed minimum speed on iol and utv if any?
i know eircom say 265kb/s or so, and IBB say something like 70kb/s on breeze plus.... that would be important to me

Flogen

dub45

what is the guarenteed minimum speed on iol and utv if any?

I do not think that any of the ISP's will give a guaranteed minimum speed.

This is a matter that I have posted on elsewhere before but nobody seems particularly interested for some strange reason.

It appears to me that at the moment no matter who you sign up with you are buying a pig in a poke. There are no minimum standards so in theory anyways you could be stuck with an awful service and have no comeback at all.

I wonder is there anything else where customers pay an amount of €600 approx annually with such vagueness attached to it?

luckat

UTV's still too dear. 30 eurons a month is as much as I'm prepared to pay.

fatherdougalmag

Word just in from the horse's mouth (i.e. IOL BB sales):

The 8GB data transfer does apply to both upload and download together.

MrPinK

Originally posted by flogen
what is the guarenteed minimum speed on iol and utv if any?
i know eircom say 265kb/s or so....

Not quite. You're line has to be capable of at least 256Kb/s or else they won't give you RADSL, but the only speed you're guarenteed is the max connection speed divided by the contention ratio. It'll be the same for wireless but they usually have a smaller contention ratio.

flogen

ah, in that case i might just go for IBB, they have an 8:1 ratio on breeze plus, while everywhere else seems to have something like 20:1 which is pretty sucky.
cheers

Flogen

Ricardfred

Hi. I got my Eircom starter pack last Friday, 3 weeks after odering online. Had it set up in 10 mins and I am delighted with it. However another starter pack (modem etc) arrived this morning! I just returned it in the post but I have a feeling that this wont be the end of it! From what people are saying about Eircom I'll probably be getting billed twice as well.....

Lex_Diamonds

Yes, from what ive heard all dsl will be highly contended in six months to a year. Eircom have no plans to increase bandwidth and everyone will be getting far below the advertised speeds. The only way of avoiding this is action through the govt. and I dont see this happening.

Frank Grimes

Originally posted by Lex_Diamonds
Yes, from what ive heard all dsl will be highly contended in six months to a year. Eircom have no plans to increase bandwidth and everyone will be getting far below the advertised speeds. The only way of avoiding this is action through the govt. and I dont see this happening.

DSL anywhere is a contended service, I doubt there's anything any government can do about that.

Lex_Diamonds

I realise that but in most countries the contention never comes into play. The unique situation that we will face here is extremely low speeds close to 24/7.

Frank Grimes

Originally posted by Lex_Diamonds
The unique situation that we will face here is extremely low speeds close to 24/7.

True, and expensive too

visigoth

Does it really matter about the price, or the caps? Jebus, stop moaning already.

BB rules, no matter which service provider you go with, it's faster, faster, faster.

For years in ireland we have had to settle for LESS than 56kbps connections, or 128k ISDN. It's only quite recently that Irish internet users have been spoilt for choice with BB, and all the different BB ISPs.

Man, I've been an internet user in Ireland for over 6years, and I'm so crazy happy with BB because i've had to put up with such terrible speeds for such a long time.

But, yeah, it IS expensive here. But BB is new. Any new technolgies that come to us, start out expensive, look at mobile phones for example. AND, you really can't do a price comparison to other European countries where BB has been around for years.

The price will drop in the future. Just give it time.

Visi.

ps: don't moan, feel sorry for the ppl that can't even get BB... *sob* those poor, poor children... won't somebody PLEASE think of the children...

Frank Grimes

Originally posted by visigoth
Does it really matter about the price, or the caps? Jebus, stop moaning already.

Well, yes.

Any new technolgies that come to us, start out expensive, look at mobile phones for example

DSL is hardly new anymore, even in Ireland so this "reason" isn't really vaild anymore.

visigoth

Just trying to get the point accross that we're better off with BB (even with high prices, caps, etc) than with 56k connections (oh the horror!) and it's beyond me why ppl keep complaining.
We are better off, aren't we?

Frank Grimes

Originally posted by visigoth
We are better off, aren't we?

For those of "us" that can get it, in a way yes.
But that's a discussion for the IOFFL boards.

Venom

visigoth I agree with you on almost everything you have stated.

For years we got gipped with a crappy service that was overpriced. Now we do have access to very affordable DSL for those of us lucky enough to be in area's that support it. I dont care how much cheeper it is in other countries or how long they have had access to it. This is ripoff Ireland were living in and all I know is my phone bill has dropped by a 6th since I got DSL in

The one part of your post I disagree with is about it getting cheeper in time. Eircom are greedy rat whoring skull screwing scumbags, always have been and always will be. Therefore the price of any of there products will never drop in price.

captainpat

The attitude that we should be eternally grateful for eircom allowing some "colleague" companies to rip us off on their inflated wholesale rates is what keeps this country in slavery. Just because it is better than three years ago doesn't mean that it even approaches being good. We are a cowardly bunch of consumers, thoroughly under the thumb of every industry that sells to us. In everything, we pay more than almost everybody on earth for a very mediocre service.

The comparison with mobile phones is the ideal one. Far from having the technology drive down the prices, it was the sheer volume of use that allowed the suppliers to drip a reduction through to the consumers, while ensuring that total revenues continued to soar.

There is no competition in Ireland. The consumer has absolutely no say, and those who are appointed to care for their interests seem to care more about their Company Cars and early pensions than protecting the valid expectations of communications users.

The brown envelopes may be gone, but they have been replaced by e-contracts and Board seats in the future. Meantime, just endure and hope.

dub45

Now we do have access to very affordable DSL for those of us lucky enough to be in area's that support it.

Approx; €600 euros a year plus line rental is still a lot of money for some people.

Synkronite

Originally posted by LoGiE

This seems in contrast to the poor pings for IOL and slow downloads not to mention throttling and IBB I believe isnt great for pings.

IOL do NOT throttle users..
Downloads are just as fast as Eircom (From my experiences)
And pings are actually better for me (Which Ive already posted..)

While the latter two may be judgemental, the first isnt.

Cabaal

Originally posted by dub45
I do not think that any of the ISP's will give a guaranteed minimum speed.

Well yes and no to that
BT in the UK will check line for faults if your getting under 30k/sec on a fast FTP (for example there own)

Cabaal

Originally posted by visigoth
Just trying to get the point accross that we're better off with BB (even with high prices, caps, etc) than with 56k connections (oh the horror!) and it's beyond me why ppl keep complaining.
We are better off, aren't we?

You see the problem with this is...the Gov apparently wants everyone on the net but how is this going to happen with high prices and only available in certain areas.

Oh and if you do get DSL and little Johnny decides he wants to download the new'est latest and greatest game demos and he goes over the cap EirCON can charge you a arm and a leg, now if this happens and Johnny's parents have to fork out 500E you think there friends will want to get DSL?
No they'll properly stay with dial-up.

Also the point of it taking ages for people to get DSL even if it is in there area.

Lets compare this to the UK,

Large Majority of ISP's have NO CAP whatsoever!!

DSL can be ordered from any ISP and is usually set-up
in 10-14 days

You don't need to provide a phone bill to your ISP when ordered DSL (like you have to do with Esat because Eircon require it)

Last time I looked 72% of the UK can get Broadband

Prices, ok I'm not going to go into this much... :-D
1MB DSL here costs 3 times more then UK

Oh and you can get a 26MegaBit Connection in Japan from Yahoo-BB for around €43.00 a month

so, why should we be happy with the service we're getting, we get taken from every side when you get DSL here, its a joke.

If we don't complain we get NOTHING, so lets go back and not complain about not having any kind of flat-rate product from Esat/Eircom/UTV
now fast forward to now and see what that gets you...NOTHING

In saying all of the above I do have DSL its Esat Business 512K

Venom

Cabaal I was just stating that I was glad to get cheeper and faster access to the net than i used to have when 56k and ISDN were the only overpriced options open to me. Of course I want it cheeper and faster with a "real"* unlimited download cap, but its still better than what I used to have.


* lying Netsourse rat buggering swines.