Ok so who's thinking of Downgrading their UPC Broadband max before price increase?

Snake Plisken

I certainly am, they have been times when their service has been pretty patchy , I mean I'll pay the €40 but 42 don't think so, I'll live with the 10meg service, I'll take the €10 charge.

Anyone else thinking about it?

Magnet: Rory

Snake Plisken wrote: »

I certainly am, they have been times when their service has been pretty patchy , I mean I'll pay the €40 but 42 don't think so, I'll live with the 10meg service, I'll take the €10 charge.

Anyone else thinking about it?

€10 charge?????? For what?

jimmycrackcorm

All my speedtests show 10 mb down 1.5mb up so I think I'll downgrade.

jimmycrackcorm

Rorser wrote: »

€10 charge?????? For what?

I'd be very quick to ask why I've been paying an extra €10 every month getting 10mb instead of 20mb

Magnet: Rory

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

I'd be very quick to ask why I've been paying an extra €10 every month getting 10mb instead of 20mb

Didnt he say he would have to pay a €10 charge for something???

endaob

There's a €10 charge for downgrading a service with UPC. Might wait til I can cancel their TV and get sky in instead ... I think it's one charge for downgrading everything...

kaimera

what now?

they are upping the price of the 20mb package??

guil

afaik everythin is goin/gone up 2 euro
but come one an extra 2 on top of 40 is hardly somethin to worry about

Magnet: Rory

guil07 wrote: »

afaik everythin is goin/gone up 2 euro
but come one an extra 2 on top of 40 is hardly somethin to worry about

true, but wtf....€10 for "downgrading"......does any other company do that?

AlmightyCushion

Rorser wrote: »

true, but wtf....€10 for "downgrading"......does any other company do that?

Eircom do. Don't know about anyone else. I assume the eircom resellers do the same. Meh, 'tis only €2.

sdanseo

I've a notion some of UPC's practices may be illegal under competiton law somewhere. For example, a €3 non direct-debit charge? And a €6 fee for having 20MB broadband as stand-alone (without TV/phone) - and it's actually marketed that way, not as a discount for having TV as well etc.

Dodge.

That and as proven tonight, it doesn't work. But it's a million times better than Eircom so I'm staying where I am at €49/mo...:-/

Anti

Tis only 50quid a month lads. But im a bit shocked at their 2€ increase, i've no problem paying it if their overall service gets better. But if it stays the same ill end my contract with them and get in magnet.

GerardKeating

Rorser wrote: »

true, but wtf....€10 for "downgrading"......does any other company do that?

BT & Eircom

dunworth1

the increase is due to the tax increase

everything will be going up not just upc

Snake Plisken

So I wonder if you downgrade and get pay your €10, will they charge you another €10 if you at some stage in the future decide to upgrade,
20meg is all well and good if its consistant, but the amount of times I've seen the speed drop really badly has increased recently and tbh I don't believe I use the full package ever, what real practical use has it really?

sdanseo

dunworth1 wrote: »

the increase is due to the tax increase

everything will be going up not just upc

VAT went up 0.5%...on €40 that would be an increase of 16.5c.

madmik

Snake Plisken wrote: »

So I wonder if you downgrade and get pay your €10, will they charge you another €10 if you at some stage in the future decide to upgrade,
20meg is all well and good if its consistant, but the amount of times I've seen the speed drop really badly has increased recently and tbh I don't believe I use the full package ever, what real practical use has it really?

torrents!

vibe666

Snake Plisken wrote: »

....what real practical use has it really?

plenty.

video streaming (proper video streaming, not youtube) downloading game demo's, linux distro's, ftp'ing web serving. oh yes, and torrenting.

tbh if you're not using it you probably should downgrade and save yourself a few quid (after the 10€ charge) but plenty of us make the msot of what we have although I would like to see my full 20mbps from time to time.

Snake Plisken

vibe666 wrote: »

plenty.

video streaming (proper video streaming, not youtube) downloading game demo's, linux distro's, ftp'ing web serving. oh yes, and torrenting.

tbh if you're not using it you probably should downgrade and save yourself a few quid (after the 10€ charge) but plenty of us make the msot of what we have although I would like to see my full 20mbps from time to time.

Torrents is really reliant on the peers your downloading from, so your never going to hit that, on public torrents, you might on private problem is private torrents set ratio's so your upload speed is actually more important, anyway UPC traffic shape and trottle torrents, so gave up on them 6 months ago. I'm signed up with Rapidshare, not to pushed it downloads will now take 20 minutes rather then 10, no big deal. Also I thought with the upgrade to 20mb I would have been able to do downloads and would have been able to use blueface making calls at the same time, this is not the case so have to pause downloads while I make a call,
I'll think about it over the next few days

thebman

Okay so do they charge for going up to the next package too?

If its an administrative cost like. :P

bricks

GerardKeating wrote: »

BT & Eircom

Nothing on my bill about it.
Am I missing something?
Not that I'm a major Eircom fan but I have to say it was a hell of a lot less hassle ringing Eircom than the dreded NTL/UPC cabol.
On the other hand for your 10Euros you will get at least 25minutes of quality classical music free while on hold with NTL.

rh555

Hi,

I was thinking of switching to UPC but I have a question. I dont have a bank account in Ireland and try to pay as much as I can with my creditcard.

Now I know that UPC does accept payment by creditcard but I am unsure if they are charging extra as some companies in Ireland unfortunately do?

Thanks

thebman

bricks wrote: »

Nothing on my bill about it.
Am I missing something?
Not that I'm a major Eircom fan but I have to say it was a hell of a lot less hassle ringing Eircom than the dreded NTL/UPC cabol.
On the other hand for your 10Euros you will get at least 25minutes of quality classical music free while on hold with NTL.

A lot of classical music is public domain so you could just download it for free :P

vibe666

Snake Plisken wrote: »

anyway UPC traffic shape and trottle torrents, so gave up on them 6 months ago.

you're doing it wrong then, I've never had any issues with traffic shaping or throttling of any kind. my torrents are running much quicker than they ever were with my BT DSL. maybe it's due to the increased upload, but I'm certainly not complaining.

see below. admittedly this was a test of 2 well seeded torrents, but it pretty clearly shows no speed issues, throttling or traffic shaping.

and that's Bytes, not bits.

Snake Plisken

vibe666 wrote: »

you're doing it wrong then, I've never had any issues with traffic shaping or throttling of any kind. my torrents are running much quicker than they ever were with my BT DSL. maybe it's due to the increased upload, but I'm certainly not complaining.

see below. admittedly this was a test of 2 well seeded torrents, but it pretty clearly shows no speed issues, throttling or traffic shaping.

and that's Bytes, not bits.

Thanks for the input, i'll know everything is ok if I ever downgrade to BT:rolleyes:

Donald-Duck

Nice linux ISOs magicmarker

vibe666

Snake Plisken wrote: »

Thanks for the input, i'll know everything is ok if I ever downgrade to BT:rolleyes:

what are you on about? do yourself a favour and read my post before making smart ass comments.

vibe666 wrote: »

...my torrents are running much quicker than they ever were with my BT DSL....

this is an ntl 20mbps thread which is what i'm talking about. :rolleyes:

torrenting around 3x faster on ntl 20mbps than I was on the bt (eircom) 7.6mbps. no sign of any kind of traffic shaping and everything I could possibly want is downloaded plenty quick enough and i couldn't even envisage a situation where I'd pay for something like rapidshare.

Ernie Ball

vibe666 wrote: »

torrenting around 3x faster on ntl 20mbps than I was on the bt (eircom) 7.6mbps. no sign of any kind of traffic shaping and everything I could possibly want is downloaded plenty quick enough and i couldn't even envisage a situation where I'd pay for something like rapidshare.

No doubt all of that is true. However, if you were on any kind of tracker where you need to keep a ratio, you'd find that what UPC throttles is the upstream bandwidth. That makes it impossible to keep a ratio up.

vibe666

Ernie Ball wrote: »

No doubt all of that is true. However, if you were on any kind of tracker where you need to keep a ratio, you'd find that what UPC throttles is the upstream bandwidth. That makes it impossible to keep a ratio up.

again, no not at all (in my experience so far).

my ratio used to be terrible (as you can see from the little yellow button at the bottom in my screen grab which was taken on my first day with ntl). since i moved over I've managed to up my ratio from a rather poor 0.6(ish) to over 1.5.

admittedly I did reset it after having been moved over for a few days as the ratio didn't seem to be moving upwards at any kind of meaningful rate due to how long it had been down, but it soon shot up after being reset and has been holding at a steady 1.5xx now for several weeks.

I've rarely used private trackers except when something is unavailable anywhere else, but I don't have any speed issues on the public trackers that I use, so why bother?

i suppose my lack of speed issues could be related to my area only recently getting the 20mbps service and maybe there's not a lot of other people using it, but so far(touch wood) i'm yet to have any real issues.

i do rarely get anything like the full 20mbps out of it (i think 18 down was my max in speed tests) and it does tend to wander up and down depending on the time of day when i do the speed tests, but overall i'm delighted with it.

lostinNaas

We have UPC 3MB - have had for a few years. Fine for our needs. Being billed at €30/month.

However on the bill it says we have "Broadband Express". Which, according to the website should be 10MB.

So, I call UPC. I tell them we appear to be getting the "broadband value" service, but are being billed for "broadband express".

No, they say, we have the "old broadband value" which costs €30, not the current one which costs €20. Strange, there is no mention of this "old" product on the bill or website. As far as I can see, they have three broadband products - we are receiving the 3MB product, but are getting billed for the 10MB product.

So, can we have a refund? Certainly not. On the contrary, if we want to start paying the correct price for the product (€20), we can pay €10 "downgrade" charge.

How can that be a downgrade I ask? We have 3MB - we will still have the same 3MB service. They say, we are "downgrading the price, not the service".

This is staggering. After some discussion they agree to "waive the downgrade fee". What a company. However, I know from past experience that BT and EIrcom are no better.

Magnet: Rory

lostinNaas wrote: »

We have UPC 3MB - have had for a few years. Fine for our needs. Being billed at €30/month.

However on the bill it says we have "Broadband Express". Which, according to the website should be 10MB.

So, I call UPC. I tell them we appear to be getting the "broadband value" service, but are being billed for "broadband express".

No, they say, we have the "old broadband value" which costs €30, not the current one which costs €20. Strange, there is no mention of this "old" product on the bill or website. As far as I can see, they have three broadband products - we are receiving the 3MB product, but are getting billed for the 10MB product.

So, can we have a refund? Certainly not. On the contrary, if we want to start paying the correct price for the product (€20), we can pay €10 "downgrade" charge.

How can that be a downgrade I ask? We have 3MB - we will still have the same 3MB service. They say, we are "downgrading the price, not the service".

This is staggering. After some discussion they agree to "waive the downgrade fee". What a company. However, I know from past experience that BT and EIrcom are no better.

well not everyone applies a downgrade charge.

dub45

Rorser wrote: »

well not everyone applies a downgrade charge.

Especially when you are not downgrading!!! Downgrading the price thats a new one!!!!:rolleyes:

Magnet: Rory

dub45 wrote: »

Especially when you are not downgrading!!! Downgrading the price thats a new one!!!!:rolleyes:

Im sorry.....this is the best ever case of "computer says no"

lostinNaas

Rorser wrote: »

Im sorry.....this is the best ever case of "computer says no"

Actually UPC girl almost used those words! She said "there's nothing I can do about it, as soon as I press the button, the downgrade charge will be applied automatically".

After I calmed down, she seemed to find another button. :rolleyes:

Magnet: Rory

lostinNaas wrote: »

Actually UPC girl almost used those words! She said "there's nothing I can do about it, as soon as I press the button, the downgrade charge will be applied automatically".

After I calmed down, she seemed to find another button. :rolleyes:

WTF...she must have solemnly believed that the computers were running the business. Some people dont realise that decisions are made by human beings.

vibe666

lostinNaas wrote: »

Actually UPC girl almost used those words! She said "there's nothing I can do about it, as soon as I press the button, the downgrade charge will be applied automatically".

After I calmed down, she seemed to find another button. :rolleyes:

i'd seriously be asking to talk to a manager at that stage, that is ridiculous.

find out when the upgrades happened and how long they've been incorrectly billing you and get a refund off them asap.

it doesn't matter what you're doing in life, if someone tells you that they are going to screw you and you bend over and take it, then they'll keep doing it.

Magnet: Rory

vibe666 wrote: »

i'd seriously be asking to talk to a manager at that stage, that is ridiculous.

find out when the upgrades happened and how long they've been incorrectly billing you and get a refund off them asap.

it doesn't matter what you're doing in life, if someone tells you that they are going to screw you and you bend over and take it, then they'll keep doing it.

"puter says naoo"

vibe666

screw the pooter, see what dunphy has to say about it!

Moriarty

vibe666 wrote: »

i'd seriously be asking to talk to a manager at that stage, that is ridiculous.

find out when the upgrades happened and how long they've been incorrectly billing you and get a refund off them asap.

it doesn't matter what you're doing in life, if someone tells you that they are going to screw you and you bend over and take it, then they'll keep doing it.

There's been no incorrect billing, he was being billed for the service he was on. The "upgrades" were new services which were launched, afaik you had to agree to a new 12 month contract to be put on the new packages. (I'm ignoring the downgrade/etc carfuddle, I presume the agent was confused on the other end of the phone)

vibe666

Moriarty wrote: »

There's been no incorrect billing, he was being billed for the service he was on. The "upgrades" were new services which were launched, afaik you had to agree to a new 12 month contract to be put on the new packages. (I'm ignoring the downgrade/etc carfuddle, I presume the agent was confused on the other end of the phone)

that sounds very dodgy to me. they're upgrading all their services and instead of updating all their users they keep them on the old packages at the old higher price and charge them to downgrade their bill to a lower price for the same service?

lostinNaas

Rorser wrote: »

Im sorry.....this is the best ever case of "computer says no"

vibe666 wrote: »

that sounds very dodgy to me. they're upgrading all their services and instead of updating all their users they keep them on the old packages at the old higher price and charge them to downgrade their bill to a lower price for the same service?

Or, at the very least, they should have automatically upgraded our service to 10MB, since that is what they are charging us for. But they didn't. I asked about this and they say they would have if we had asked for it, that they published this information on the website.

We are long past the original 12 month contract. To me it is simple - they have three products listed on their website: value, express, ultra. We are getting "value" and being billed for "express". It says so on the bill. If we are paying €30/month for an "old" product, then surely they should call it something else, like "old broadband value, 10 euro more than current broadband value, thanks sucker".

Moriarty

What level of service did you sign up to, at what price?

You've been paying the same amount of money for the same level of service all along, correct?

UPC haven't done anything wrong. They sent out promotional bumph in at least two of their billing cycles letting customers know about the new high speed services. They've been on their website for aaaaaages. All you had to do was ask to be 'upgraded'.

lostinNaas

I've being going to the same lady for a haircut for years. Nice lady, and transparent about the price - it's posted on the door and inside. Last month it was €16 for wash and cut.

Last week I was surprised to see she'd dropped the price to €10. How's that, I ask? She points at the new hairdresser across the street, run by a couple of Polish women. Competitive pressures, she says, rolling her eyes. Yes, and they're better looking too, but I didn't say that out loud.

Anyway, says she, I'm only charging new customers 10 euro, for you it's still 16.
Wha? I say. Well, she says, that's sounds unfair, tell you what, I'll throw in a beard trim, and you have to promise to only come to me for the next year. But I don't have a beard and don't plan on growing one.

At this point she gets quite annoyed and says well, if you insist, I'll charge you the new price from now on, but you'll have to slip me a tenner. Grand says I.

Ok, that's not a true story, but it's how I explained UPC's business practice to my mother, who is not clear what a MB is.

Moriarty - I don't agree with you. Their "upgrade" is just a sneaky way to get me nailed down for another 12 month contact. I am out of contract. I don't want or need an upgrade from 3MB to 10MB. If they change the price for the 3MB service, up OR down, it should be applied to everyone on that service that is out of contract.

dub45

lostinNaas wrote: »

I've being going to the same lady for a haircut for years. Nice lady, and transparent about the price - it's posted on the door and inside. Last month it was €16 for wash and cut.

Last week I was surprised to see she'd dropped the price to €10. How's that, I ask? She points at the new hairdresser across the street, run by a couple of Polish women. Competitive pressures, she says, rolling her eyes. Yes, and they're better looking too, but I didn't say that out loud.

Anyway, says she, I'm only charging new customers 10 euro, for you it's still 16.
Wha? I say. Well, she says, that's sounds unfair, tell you what, I'll throw in a beard trim, and you have to promise to only come to me for the next year. But I don't have a beard and don't plan on growing one.

At this point she gets quite annoyed and says well, if you insist, I'll charge you the new price from now on, but you'll have to slip me a tenner. Grand says I.

Ok, that's not a true story, but it's how I explained UPC's business practice to my mother, who is not clear what a MB is.

Moriarty - I don't agree with you. Their "upgrade" is just a sneaky way to get me nailed down for another 12 month contact. I am out of contract. I don't want or need an upgrade from 3MB to 10MB. If they change the price for the 3MB service, up OR down, it should be applied to everyone on that service that is out of contract.

And when they increase their prices they conveniently forget that you signed up to an older price! No problem there in applying the new price to everyone!!!:rolleyes:

Blame UTV they were the first ones to introduce this lark of refusing to pass on new product prices unless you signed up for a further 12 months and people on here actually defended them at the time!!!!!

vibe666

Moriarty wrote: »

What level of service did you sign up to, at what price?

You've been paying the same amount of money for the same level of service all along, correct?

UPC haven't done anything wrong. They sent out promotional bumph in at least two of their billing cycles letting customers know about the new high speed services. They've been on their website for aaaaaages. All you had to do was ask to be 'upgraded'.

i wonder if people would be saying that if eircom had done the same thing when they did their own speed increases instead of automatically upgrading everyone?

not everyone reads the mountains of crap mail that comes through their door, or looks at their ISP's website reguarly.

Stokolan

You sign a contract for a service regardless of the 12 month period being over you you still only requested the 3mb service. Mobile phone companies have been doing it for years. changing their price plans and not automaticly changing people over.

Now they could have came back to you and said they had a new package would you like to sign up. which most good companys would do.

The fact that it says on the bill your paying for Broadband express instead of your original package you should be able to get something back. might be worth havingg a chat with someone in the know.

rogue-entity

Moriarty wrote: »

You've been paying the same amount of money for the same level of service all along, correct?

UPC haven't done anything wrong. They sent out promotional bumph in at least two of their billing cycles letting customers know about the new high speed services. They've been on their website for aaaaaages. All you had to do was ask to be 'upgraded'.

I disagree, he signed up for a specific package which cost a set price and gave a set speed, UPC upgraded the speeds on each of their packages and should either have lowered the price charged to the customer or increased the customer's speed since they billed the customer for "broadband express" and failed to provide them with that.

Im considering switching over to UPC from Digiweb, for the faster speed, and more importantly the lower price and lack of cap.

dub45

Stokolan wrote: »

You sign a contract for a service regardless of the 12 month period being over you you still only requested the 3mb service. Mobile phone companies have been doing it for years. changing their price plans and not automaticly changing people over.

Just to remind people that because someone else does this - does not in any way justify UPC doing it.

Stokolan wrote: »

Now they could have came back to you and said they had a new package would you like to sign up. which most good companys would do.

Why not show some goodwil to customers and just do this automatically?

The much maligned Eircom have done this since the introduction of bb.

vibe666

dub45 wrote: »

Why not show some goodwil to customers and just do this automatically?

The much maligned Eircom have done this since the introduction of bb.

ditto.

i'm sure there's no legal reason obliging them to do this, but it's still pretty shoddy.