Chorus Nightmare in Cork

felimmcmahon

Here is my experience of Chours cablenet broadband:

Mid-September 2006: Joined the service. I specifically asked whether there were any known issues in Cork, as I would be using the connection for business purposes. I was assured that everything was working fine. Things went well for about two weeks.

Sunday, October 1st: The service goes down for the first time. More problems ensued in the following days, with the customer care operator offering the excuse that it had been ‘an exceptional week’. My connection suffered from sporadic drop-outs over the next two weeks, leading me to request more detailed information on what exactly was happening to the service.

Wednesday, October 18th: After a day of constant drop-outs, customer service said that the interruptions were due to a problem in Cork. Chorus had still not called me back regarding my request, two weeks previously, for more detailed information. The internet service remained down for the next three days. A team leader at Chorus’s Limerick call centre agreed that the service was “atrocious”, and explained that there were ongoing and serious problems in Cork, but assured me that they would lead “in the future” to “a first class service”. There was no service whatsoever for the next two weeks.

November 1st: First phone call from Chorus regarding ongoing faults.

November 9th: Chorus have been in regular contact regarding the issued. This usually consists of a customer care team member saying there are ongoing issues, offering assurances that they are looking into the matter, and, lately, stressing that the problem in Cork city has been fixed and that the issues with my connection stem from a more localised fault. No further information. No timetable for fixing the fault. No idea whether the matter has been addressed by Chorus engineers. And still no internet connection.

Summary: I joined Chorus two months ago, after being assured that there were no problems in Cork city. Partly due to what one Chorus customer care team leader described as “ongoing and serious issues in Cork city”, I have had no internet for six out of the last nine weeks. I still have no idea what the fault is or what, if any, action has been taken to remedy the matter.

Sincerely,

Félim McMahon

probe

When Liberty Media finally gets around to rationalising it's Irish operations I would have thought that they would close down the Chorus facility in Limerick and run the entire system from a single purpose built location.

The quality of service provided by Chorus has been appalling since the company started, and NTL is only marginally better.

If ComReg was doing the job in a pro-active way, it would give Liberty Media a limited period in which to get their operation up to scratch or face the loss of it's cable operator’s licenses.

Very few people using Irish cable networks have broadband from cable. The range of TV channels and the quality of service is appallingly poor. None of the Irish cable networks have upgraded to HDTV. Chorus still has mono sound for TV in Cork. Ireland has a culturally and linguistically diverse population and none of the cable networks cater for this.

I live in a town of around 30,000 people, and the town’s cable TV system (run by the municipal water company as an “ex-curricular” activity) has HD TV channels, Euronews and Eurosport comes with about eight different sound tracks and you can use the remote control to select the language you prefer. Near video on demand offers movies with the language options available on the movie’s disk. You are paying for the movie – why shouldn’t you be able to watch it in your language of choice? There are about 300 broadcast TV channels including pay TV channels from neighbouring countries – PPV sports and other events. French, German, Spanish, English, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, American English, Chinese, Polish, etc. etc – they are all catered for. The system also carries about 50 radio station feeds.

They don’t use fibre – just properly installed co-ax and a well managed control centre. The local free to air terrestrial channels are also transmitted over the cable in the clear without needing a set top box. Nobody has an excuse to install an ugly TV antenna or satellite dish anywhere!

.probe

watty

I think Comreg is unlikely to interfere. UPC I'd say is running flat out upgrading, unlike NTL and Chorus who indeed both would have lost licences in the pasrt except it was not politically expedient.

Blaster99

Flat-out upgrading where/what exactly?

kaizersoze

felimmcmahon wrote:

Mid-September 2006: Joined the service. I specifically asked whether there were any known issues in Cork, as I would be using the connection for business purposes. I was assured that everything was working fine. Things went well for about two weeks.

LOL. What were you expecting them to say?
"No sir. Our service is crap with regular outages and customer service is even worse. Please take your business elsewhere".

My experiences with Chorus (TV) have been brutal and I've long since left them along with many others. I wouldn't touch them for BB with a 40 foot pole. Get out if you can.

probe

In summary – despite the propaganda, in reality there is little hope for you with Chorus, and nothing that can be done here. We’ve tried. But as watty implies, it is not politically expedient in Ireland force them to provide 21st century cable. Or anything else to do with communications.

You are better off, (particularly when you need broadband for business), to go for the state sponsored / protected eircom monopoly broadband service. It is expensive, more or less the slowest in Europe, and doesn’t come with the multi-media services (TV, VoD, VoIP as standard or even as an optional extra), something one takes for granted in competitive broadband markets. B&B-eircom-rebranded-DeptofP&T (BERPT!) has 95% of the DSL market with ComReg/DMCNR’s blessing. As a result no pressure on the national cable TV monopoly.

Elsewhere it would be called total market domination. In Ireland, the powers that be have set up several websites that purport to show one lots of DSL/cable broadband choices – in actual reality they are only “travel agents” or the services they purport to offer perform poorly in the real world, and you would be foolish to bet your business on them.

Because eircom is allowed to get away with making loop unbundling inefficient and unworkable.

Sure you can go to the broadband equivalent of a “travel agent” and sign up for “their” DSL broadband package, but you will be still flying with the 1960s government monopoly airline that was Aer Lingus – ie eircom. While the airline industry has moved on in Ireland, DSL broadband is still stuck in slow, expen$ive, pig inefficient Dept of P&T mode.

Better still, if your circumstances permit, sell up any over valued Irish property that you may own and go to a real travel agent and move your business to a country where there is a competitive telecommunications market and a decent planning system. If you pick the right place you will find that it probably only rains for half a day a month, your shopping trolley costs 50% of what it used to cost back in Ireland with better quality merchandise, etc. etc. etc…

.probe

watty

Once UPC are prepared to take down the Chorus and NTL branding and promote "chello", then you know they have upgraded.

NTL network was poor, but the Chorus network made it look brilliant. I wonder how much research the new owners did? Anyway, while it will take a while and they can't do everywhere at once they are doing the upgrades. The difference I've seen in some areas in Limerick in last few months is amazing. People upgraded from unwatchable analogue to Digital as good as SDTV cable anywhere. Also some people actually able to get BB on cable in Limerick now (rather than rumours of its existance).

Some of us have roots too deep and decent jobs so we can't move. I tried it personally 16 years ago and the company went bust. We ended up back in Ireland worse off than if we hadn't left.

cgarvey

8gbMadness banned, post deleted