They really dont care about their customers

lynchie

I've had enough.. Im not willing to put up with them anymore.. That shower of cnuts have lost themselves another customer.

I posted a while back about the sudden reduced speed I was getting on my 4Mb line. It appears as if my speeds are capped around 235KB/s. Line is perfect, am 100M from the exchange, nothing has changed on my end, modem is still connected at 4Mb, even the cisco router is telling me it can handle 4Mb on the line. The signal and line attenutation are all fine. Yet the muppets in Eircom are telling me the line is perfect. Since the last upgrades, my line was happilly downloading at 415KB/s which is about the max the line will do since interleaving is turned on. For over a year everything was fine until about 6 weeks ago when all of a sudden my speeds were dropping to 235KB/s.

So I rang support a few weeks back, the usualy crap about your internet settings and cookies, explained to them what the problem was, asked to speak to a manager, told they would ring me back.. never heard anything for a week. Rang again, this time all the managers were in a meeting, so again, left my details for them to ring me back.. Nothing... So I rang last Friday, and again, after enduring the stupid questions from the support bloke, told him I wanted an engineer to come out and test the line from my premises. Fine he says, 57 euro call out charge regardless if there is a fault or not. Grand, send him out, here's me contact details.

A week later, no call back, so I ring them this morning. I was told that the request for the engineer was cancelled by the team lead cause he said his test of the line found no fault. :mad: So I lost it and asked to speak to a manger. When ur man said they are not available, I went mental. So off he went, and finally came back and said engineer would be called out.. Explained the callout charge again to me and said he'd be in touch.

So bout an hour ago, he rings back saying engineer wont be coming out. "Why?" says I.
"Oh, he says the line is fine so he doesnt need to come out".
"What? But Im paying for him to come out and test it."
"But he is not willing to come out and test it" :eek:
"Fine, Im not willing to pay for this service anymore..."
"Ok, the number for cancellations is...."

So, now im still pissed off.. but i've made my mind up.. im ditching the whole lot. So I want to change providers. Can somebody give me the quick steps on moving to another carrier, e.g. Smart.

I know im gonna have downtime, but I need to keep it to the minimum. So I need to cancel my eircom broadband at the end of a billing cycle? Next one aint until end of Jan, which suits me so I wont lose connectivity over xmas. So, do I just ring up and say cancel my broadband, and my lines?

Under the best scenario, what will be my downtime? 10 working days?

Also, does anybody know if its possible to do the following? I have 2 lines at the moment, one is broadband enabled the other fails (hence the reason for 2 lines) Can I transfer my original numer from the line that fails over to the new line that is broadband enabled and only have 1 line going forward?

I've calmed down a little, so back to work...

RangeR

I feel your pain. In answer to some of your questions.

About a year ago it used to be...
10 business days to cancel BB
10 business days to activate it with another provider.

This is a total of 20 business days, or the guts of a month when you include weekends. So get ready for that downtime.

And this is assuming that there will be no delays, as there will be.

Your best bet is to ring Smart [I've heard great things about them] and they will advise you on the best practice.

paulm17781

Where's that guy who was saying Eircon support aren't s**** gone? He'd help! :rolleyes:

Where are you? What/who are your other options? NTL, Smart, Magnet, Digiweb (metro). All have to be better than Eircon.

Blaster99

Do you not think in all likelihood that the line is fine? If you're connecting at 4096kbps and the line stats are all fine, then the problem is very likely to be somewhere else. It would be useful to get an engineer out to verify the actual speed and then work on figuring out what's causing the problem. Try to get away from it being a line problem perhaps.

jd

If the connection is synching at 4096, I can't see it being a line problem.

onedmc

I started with Irish Broadband which was in fact slower than my ISDN line. I then swithched to Eircom which I though at the time was bril, I have now moved to NTL. It is significantly better than Eircom but who knows how long that will last .

lynchie

Blaster99 wrote:

Do you not think in all likelihood that the line is fine? If you're connecting at 4096kbps and the line stats are all fine, then the problem is very likely to be somewhere else. It would be useful to get an engineer out to verify the actual speed and then work on figuring out what's causing the problem. Try to get away from it being a line problem perhaps.

I asked for an engineer to come out, they said it would be 57 euro, but now they said the engineer wont come out cause the line is fine... I wanted him to come out with his router plug it in to my line and see what he gets.. As you mentioned, with RADSL, the router will connect at a speed that your line is capable of carrying up to the configured max on the DSLAM, so if it connects at 4096, it should do 4096 (which it was doing for over a year, now its not, and the line quality has NOT changed since then)

lynchie

IrishTLR wrote:

I feel your pain. In answer to some of your questions.

About a year ago it used to be...
10 business days to cancel BB
10 business days to activate it with another provider.

This is a total of 20 business days, or the guts of a month when you include weekends. So get ready for that downtime.

And this is assuming that there will be no delays, as there will be.

Your best bet is to ring Smart [I've heard great things about them] and they will advise you on the best practice.

20 feckin business days? Hows a person with a home office meant to carry out their business in a meaningful way if they have to live in the dark ages for a month when changing carriers. I suppose a complaint to comreg will fall on deaf ears with the rest of them?

Sponge Bob

lynchie wrote:

As you mentioned, with RADSL, the router will connect at a speed that your line is capable of carrying up to the configured max on the DSLAM, so if it connects at 4096, it should do 4096 (which it was doing for over a year, now its not, and the line quality has NOT changed since then)

I feel a script idea coming up here , I think I should name this script concept "The Prisoner" and set it in a cool seaside town populated entirely by weirdos....but I digress.

One weakness in your case, should you choose to escalate, is that Eircom ONLY guarantee 256k on RADSL but guarantee the full port speed on ADSL . Their higher end products are typically ADSL but may be RADSL . Either way you should check exactly what you have but they have a get out on RADSL as it is running at a stonking 2048k and thereby perfectly functional .

Full list of products page 6 of this

HTH

is_that_so

I am about to switch DSL shortly and I was told by the new provider NOT to cancel my connection. This seems to be where the nightmares start. They will send me a transfer form which will be sent to the old provider. At most I'll be down 5 days although the nice woman on the phone suggested 2 days.All very simple. I live in hope. :rolleyes:

Sponge Bob

is_that_so wrote:

I am about to switch DSL shortly and I was told by the new provider NOT to cancel my connection. This seems to be where the nightmares start. They will send me a transfer form which will be sent to the old provider.

You are transferring to a Bitstream operator but Lynnchie is going to an LLU operator where the procedure deliberately takes longer as Eircom wants to keep people away from ADSL operators who can do 24 Mbits and funky stuff like that.

bk

Move to NTL if you can, 3m/300k for €45

The transfer is easy, I got NTL installed and once I show that it was working, I just cancelled the DSL, so I had no downtime.

Blaster99

lynchie wrote:

the router will connect at a speed that your line is capable of carrying up to the configured max on the DSLAM, so if it connects at 4096, it should do 4096 (which it was doing for over a year, now its not, and the line quality has NOT changed since then)

I'm confused. You wrote above that "modem is still connected at 4Mb". Are you now saying you're not synching at 4096? What are you synching at?

Peanut

Lynchie I suspected something had changed with the 4M line here also but hadn't really tested it.

Just looking at it now confirms that it hovers about 2500kbit, with occasional peaks to 3500kbit (highest) and drops to 1500kbit.

It really sounds like they know exactly what is going on and are just trying to fob you off. My guess is that they are doing the equivalent of the old January sales trick - prices are artifically increased before Christmas in order to make the sale discounts look better.

In this case, it looks like they are increasing the contention along the line somewhere now, in order to "pay" a bit for the speed "upgrades" in January.

However I think the stated contention for Business Enhanced is 24:1, but in reality, it has more or less been 1:1 (at least up to 2mbit) so, unfortunately, I don't think we can really complain, even if it does suck...

Look at their speed test page here. They only guarantee a minimum of 2Mbit on Business Enhanced.
http://home.eircom.net/speedtest/default.asp?id=1

I would wait until January to see what happens.
I think they will keep contention at current levels and just knock up the upper cap from 3.5mbit to 4.5 or something llike that, so average rates should increase (back) to 3mbit I guess.

(edit: I'm more worried about the upload rates though, it looks like they may be jumping around a bit more than they used to..)

oldboy

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single5715

could they be up to something ? working on equipment in preparation for the above ??

lynchie

Blaster99 wrote:

I'm confused. You wrote above that "modem is still connected at 4Mb". Are you now saying you're not synching at 4096? What are you synching at?

my modem does sync at 4096, what I was trying to say is that under RADSL, your modem will negotiate the highest connection available on the line up to the max configured speed. So if it connects at 4096 ur line can do 4096, if not it may connect at 3xxx instead depending on ur line quality.

lynchie

Peanut wrote:

Lynchie I suspected something had changed with the 4M line here also but hadn't really tested it.

Just looking at it now confirms that it hovers about 2500kbit, with occasional peaks to 3500kbit (highest) and drops to 1500kbit.

It really sounds like they know exactly what is going on and are just trying to fob you off. My guess is that they are doing the equivalent of the old January sales trick - prices are artifically increased before Christmas in order to make the sale discounts look better.

In this case, it looks like they are increasing the contention along the line somewhere now, in order to "pay" a bit for the speed "upgrades" in January.

However I think the stated contention for Business Enhanced is 24:1, but in reality, it has more or less been 1:1 (at least up to 2mbit) so, unfortunately, I don't think we can really complain, even if it does suck...

Look at their speed test page here. They only guarantee a minimum of 2Mbit on Business Enhanced.
http://home.eircom.net/speedtest/default.asp?id=1

I would wait until January to see what happens.
I think they will keep contention at current levels and just knock up the upper cap from 3.5mbit to 4.5 or something llike that, so average rates should increase (back) to 3mbit I guess.

(edit: I'm more worried about the upload rates though, it looks like they may be jumping around a bit more than they used to..)

Yeah they only guarantee 2mb on the 4 mb package, so once your speed test comes in above that the eircom support ppl wont do anything else for ya.

Where you getting full speeds before i.e. ~415KB/s ? Can you test downloading a large file from ftp.heanet.ie and see what speeds you get?

Sponge Bob

lynchie wrote:

Yeah they only guarantee 2mb on the 4 mb package, so once your speed test comes in above that the eircom support ppl wont do anything else for ya.

ta for that link lynchie

What is the difference between Bits(b) and Bytes(B)

Lets take the 3 main connection speeds provided over eircom Broadband:

Home Starter Package
On this package you should expect download Speeds of between 256kb and 1024kb (kilobits) or between 25KB and 100KB (Kilobytes)

Home Plus Package
On this package you should expect download Speeds of between 256kb and 2024kb (kilobits) or between 25KB and 200KB (Kilobytes)

Business Plus
On this package you should expect download Speeds of between 1MB and 2MB (megabytes) or 100KB and 200KB (Kilobytes)

Business Enhanced
On this package you should expect download Speeds of between 2MB and 4MB (megabytes) or 200KB and 400KB(Kilobytes)

so its not faulty in eircom terms unless you make it go below 2Mb. get a chainsaw maybe

Peanut

lynchie wrote:

Yeah they only guarantee 2mb on the 4 mb package, so once your speed test comes in above that the eircom support ppl wont do anything else for ya.

Where you getting full speeds before i.e. ~415KB/s ? Can you test downloading a large file from ftp.heanet.ie and see what speeds you get?

Yep I was doing those tests via http://ftp.heanet.ie/
Max I got before was 3.5Mbit I think, but it used to be a lot closer to that mark.

Checked again now, still getting 2.5Mbit on average.

FlyOver

paulm17781 wrote:

Where's that guy who was saying Eircon support aren't s**** gone? He'd help! :rolleyes:

Would that be me?

Like most people who are blinded by rage and through no fault of there own don't do the simplest of things like ask for the agent's name, manager's name and a direct line if anything goes wrong. As in the case posted above.

Get onto customer care (complaints), go through the problem with them (even if it's your 100th call) then get all the info and most importantly a direct line to a manager or above if the thing goes ****e on you.

Freddie59

FlyOver wrote:

Would that be me?

Like most people who are blinded by rage and through no fault of there own don't do the simplest of things like ask for the agent's name, manager's name and a direct line if anything goes wrong. As in the case posted above.

Get onto customer care (complaints), go through the problem with them (even if it's your 100th call) then get all the info and most importantly a direct line to a manager or above if the thing goes ****e on you.

E-mail the MD or CEO, whoever he/she is. Most companies operate a uniformed e-mail naming convention, so Eircom might be joe_bloggs@eircom.ie or joe.bloggs@eircom.ie. I had a problem with a company recently and got straight through to the MD using this system.

Problem had been going on for two months - was sorted in a day. All you need to find out is the name.

Hope that helps.:D

Sponge Bob

bloggsj@eircom.ie is the convention

Peanut

Unfortunately I don't think there is a problem to complain about, however it would be nice to get some clarification on average expected up/download speeds, and changes in relation to proposed upgrades.

I would especially like to know if there is a minimum upload rate that we can expect after January - it's a bitch trying to manage network traffic/play games if your uplink is fluctuating all over the place.

They are hardly the worst offenders though when it comes to not delivering on advertised speeds, whatever other problems people have had with them, you can't really fault them on that, and their DSL (where available) is by all accounts very stable in terms of uptime.

Peanut

Getting 3500kbit/sec again now

OfflerCrocGod

Peanut wrote:

Getting 3500kbit/sec again now

Amzing how complaining loudly will all of a sudden fix the "faults" on the line isn't it.

Peanut

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

Amzing how complaining loudly will all of a sudden fix the "faults" on the line isn't it.

ahh in fairness we mortals don't know what goes on in the inky depths of Eircom's network... (well most of us that is..)