Clicksilver / Telephony package

skibum

I am on the verge of signing up for Clicksilver €29.99 , it seems like a very good deal.

However I have 2 small concerns, the first being the "Telephony" package you have to take, does it really save you up to 25% on Eircom, or are there hidden catches which wipe out any savings?

The second being a post about their service

QUOTE]Originally posted by ArthurG
Yeah, as long as you don't mind the possibility of not being able to access Hotmail, eBay, post on boards.ie and so on, without using a proxy which might prevent you being able to access your router, and possibly bypass your Firewall.

For these and other examples of UTVs customer service, have a look at the recent 'Proxy' threads relating to NTL and UTV in the Broadband forum. [/QUOTE]

I use Hotmail, Ebay, and intend using Boards.ie a heck of a lot!! Has this issue been addressed? Do any Clicksilver users have these problems?

silent

telephone: yes they are cheaper than eircom, but not the cheapest. Having utv as carrier pre select does not hinder you though to make calls through other call-by-call providers - personally I use vartec.ie for international calls (you need to add 5 digit number prefix for each call you make this way)

about the service - quite a lot of people encounter bad pings and high packet loss, there have been some major disruptions on weekends mostly (which did not affect other providers but only utv) recently, then the proxy thing - basically all http trafic goes through a proxy at utv, however it seems that some users (me included) have issues with this using some websites that require upload from your browser back to the server - eg posting on forums, writing emails in webmails etc
This can be circumevented by using a special proxy provided by utv and works in most cases, sometimes you need to disable it though.

However the major anoyance is that utv somehow ignores or denies these issues and hardly provides any feedback when something's broken - like the recent outage on a weekend for about 12 hours for most customers - no email or other information about this were posted etc. On the proxy issue - no info except that we should use a different proxy (which was only posted in the newsgroup where only a few lurk) Very annoying.
It's not all bad but in the wake of recent events and their stance towards present subscribers forcing them into a new 12 month contract if they want lower prices speak volumes about bad business moves in my opinion

dub45

I would agree with what Silent says - I dont think most customers would want to leave UTV but really since the inception of Clicksilver they have not been the same Company.

I also have a worry about their ability to deal with the increased volume of customers that will inevitably arrive with the sub 30 euro package without a further deterioraton in service levels. They admitted that they were underresourced at one stage last year and if you read their annual report you will see that they place an emphasis as a Company on keeping down costs. this is laudable of course if it does not mean a trade off on service.

Since the beginning of 2004 there has been two long outages at weekends and two shortish ones (if you consider 3 hours each short) plus a couple of other ones here and there - that seems a lot for a little over two months.

I also think that their behaviour in relation to keeping people at the higher rate who do not opt for either of the new packages as a very bad move in all respects.

I also think people thinking of signing up with UTV might like to take note of this attitude given that there are sure to be further developments with broadband now that things have begun to develop momentum.

jank

anyother thing that strikes me as odd that using a proxy is less secure especially if you are buying something online.
those details (credit card) are left on the proxy server and could be accessed by someone else with a bit of knowhow
is UTV aware of this! or am i wrong here!?

Ripwave

Originally posted by jank
or am i wrong here!?

You're wrong here. Or you're wrong in the sense that SSL transactions aren't cached by a proxy server, and anyone who's buying from a site that isn't using SSL probably has bigger things to worry about.