Irish Broadband (Imagine) this

Bozacke

I've had IBB for over 2 years and back in April I was very upset being forced to upgrade from 3MB to 4MB at an additional cost to myself of €7/month.

I didn't request this supposed upgrade and I don't want to pay and additional €84 more per year for 1 more miserable MB of speed, which in the whole scheme of things is negligible, especially since I regularly test my Broadband speed and the speed has never been anywhere near the advertised speed of 3MB anyway. Despite the fact I never receive anywhere near 3MB speeds I have been marginally happy and I have kept the service for over two years, although I always thought that the cost of €48/month was actually too much to pay. This upgrade has no practical benefit for the customer and forcing customers to a more expensive option is despicable in these recessionary times where most service provides are looking to reduce prices and they are trying to force customers and additional €84 more per year without spending much more on their bandwidth costs. Also, with improvements in technologies, most BB suppliers are increasing their customer's speeds while reducing the price.

I emailed IBB requesting to keep the 3MB package and price and they told me "under the terms of your contract you do have the right to cancel your service within 30 days without penalty if you do not accept this package change". Isn't this great customer service and since I am a long time customer I can cancel my contract at any time with no penalty, so they aren't giving me anything extra by "allowing" me to cancel without penalty.

To make matters worse, over the past month my service has been much slower, despite paying more money and I find after 2PM the service almost grinds to a halt and is unusable.

I just called them and asked if there's anything they can do and they said no, so I requested to cancel my service. They said I need to give 30 days notice to cancel in according with my contract. Today is 3-June, but my new billing cycle is to the 7th so they said I need to pay up to the 7th. I said, "No, according to my contract I only need 30 days notice for cancellation" and they said, "That's right, you can cancel it in 30 days, but you will still be charged to the 7th".

I'm sorry, but this is just an unacceptable manner to handle long term good paying customers. IBB was good, but it looks like the stories I heard about Imagine are true. Good Bye!!

Gel

I agree,
I'm now paying €55/month and if anything the service is worse.I'm supplied off the Saggart transmitter. I rang today and they said there is a problem with the transmitter but it's unlikely to be solved in the near future. They suggested switching to a DSL line. Until recently we could not get DSL in our area. Now we can and BT, Eircom are offering cheaper deals. IBB have screwed us when we had no other options but now they know that they must compete with the other providers. So I suggest that they are screwing up the signal on purpose to make customers ring support who then suggest switching to their DSL service. In this way they get in and grab customers who might otherwise eventually switch to Eircom etc.

Marlow

The issue is, it's a contended service and from a technical side (when it was 3 mbit/s) nothing has changed. Because all packages are upped to 4 meg (or 6 meg for the high end biz packages) and all the slow packages have been abandoned, there's a bigger run on the bandwidth available. So higher contention.

And yes, the philosophy behind IBB and Imagine are different, so it's a different scheme of things you deal with now. Look around, there are other providers offering similar offerings, that might suit yourself better.

/M