Eircom and their magic BBand contract that is not .. maybe!

aidanodr

Hi Guys,

Once upon a time in a kingdom far far away ruled by the overlord called Eircom ....

Quiet a number of its citizens here in Carrigaline are recently suffering from BBand drop outs - worst day was yesterday. My sister - who lives over the other side of town - was on to Eircom ( all bow ) today.

Of course tech support saw the drops she was having and blamed it on her router. When she mentioned quiet a few others she knew were having the same problem, the reply was - Ah thats coincidental.

Anyway, She WAS NOT using an Eircom ( SMC? ) router so their was her problem. She has a Xyzel because her original Eircom Router flaked out a few months back. By the way the Xyzel worked swimmingly up to the last week or so where all the drop outs started.

He said to her surprise SHE WAS NOT IN CONTRACT. So what is this you might say? Well, to get a replacement router from Lord Eircom you need to be in contract. You have to sign up to a 12 month contract with them EVEN THOUGH - in my sisters case - she has been paying the €66 a month on a bundle for the last 5 years or more. Is that not a contract in itself?

AND she was quiet happy with her Xyzel router.

"Although you may use any broadband (ADSL / DSL) modem to connect to the eircom broadband service, eircom net Technical Support will NOT support any modem-related issues "

http://support.eircom.net/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE/&/?St=111&E=0000000000255492298&K=218&Sxi=13&Problem=obj(7454)&DCSext.clickedFrom=bb;home;setupyourmodem

So it would seem EVEN THOUGH you pay your €66 a month for a BBand Bundle you are not in contract UNLESS you sign up to a lock in 12 month period. If you use ANOTHER ROUTER besides the Eircom router TECHNICALLY you might be partially OUT OF CONTRACT also.

Does this all sound fair and tickety boo to you all? Any consumer rights infringements? Just asking now, thats all!

Aidan

manster

Sounds perfectly fair to me. Eircom probably have trained their agents in answering questions / configuring routers for all eircom supplied routers. If going by what you say then eircom would have to train their agents for every other type of router that a customer connected with. Don't think that's unfair. Btw if you had a fault with a previous router you should return it. Simple as.

Sponge Bob

Bet the problem is a banjaxed DSL card not the routers at all, it takes eircom many many months to go out and fix these so everybody start hassling them , posting in their broadband forum and raising faults every time there is a drop.

Baneblade

The contract they are refering to is the standard 6 months/1 year contratc you agree to when you sign up with any provider, i.e if you cancel the service within this timeframe you pay an early cease charge.

They recently introduced a new policy where they will only replace modems for free if you are still under this contract. If you are outside it you need to accept another year contract or they can sell you a modem for €50.

danny004

Correct me if I am wrong here but I think the point being made is its not her router anyways and Eircom are obliged to provide a reasonable service to her router which they are not doing and trying to fob her off with the its your router trick. The reason they have changed their rules to only send out new routers to people within contract is because they must send out an awful lot of new routers to replace perfectly good ones.
Lets face it a router is built up of electronic circuits with no moving parts and probably suffer from very little failure rate compared to the number of routers that are being posted out just to get rid of people off the phone from the eircom support department ,we will send you out a new router seems to be the default position.
What would be a good idea I think would be if comreg did at least one thing useful and forced eircom to display the connection status of each exchange on a web page and give daily technical updates on the status of their network.That way people could see for themselves the status of their exchange and if there was proper updates on repair time etc it should reduce the number of calls to tech support but I think the network is in such bad shape the status would be alarming. Thats of course assuming Comreg would be interested in doing one thing useful

dub45

danny004 wrote: »

Correct me if I am wrong here but I think the point being made is its not her router anyways and Eircom are obliged to provide a reasonable service to her router which they are not doing and trying to fob her off with the its your router trick. The reason they have changed their rules to only send out new routers to people within contract is because they must send out an awful lot of new routers to replace perfectly good ones.
Lets face it a router is built up of electronic circuits with no moving parts and probably suffer from very little failure rate compared to the number of routers that are being posted out just to get rid of people off the phone from the eircom support department ,we will send you out a new router seems to be the default position.
What would be a good idea I think would be if comreg did at least one thing useful and forced eircom to display the connection status of each exchange on a web page and give daily technical updates on the status of their network.That way people could see for themselves the status of their exchange and if there was proper updates on repair time etc it should reduce the number of calls to tech support but I think the network is in such bad shape the status would be alarming. Thats of course assuming Comreg would be interested in doing one thing useful

It is actually quite hard to know what point is being made other than having a go at Eircom and a customer wanting it everyway at the same time. With most isps after you complete your initial minimum period you are then on a rolling months contract and to cancel in those circumstances you give a month's notice. This arrangement seems to suit most customers as no one wants to be in a rolling 12 month contract.

Unlike some isps (like UTV for example) Eircom don't insist on the modem/router being returned at the end of a contract as evidenced by the regular queries here on how to set up a netopia with another isp.

It seems reasonable to me that an isp will not provide a new router/modem to a customer who is on a rolling months contract given that the customer could be gone within four weeks of the new router being issued.

And again as pointed out earlier it is totally unreasonable to expect any isp to support all the routers/modems that are out there.

danny004

The point is that she probably doesnt need a new router its always the ISP that suggests the router is the problem even when half of carrigaline is having the same issue. The only people who suggest a new router is Eircom which nine times out of ten is not the problem. How many times do we see it on these boards especially the 'talk to vodafone board' the Reps on that site always default to its your router and it can be quite frustrating to read lots of people with the same issue in the same area and these robots are talking about your router.
The ISP's for communication companies have a big big problem in communicating all they would have to say is yes there is a problem in carrigaline at the moment and the problem is whatever and we are trying to solve it as soon as possible and we will give daily updates but no in this girls case and all the others who contact tech support they start talking about well your syncing fine the problem must be your router.
I agree that if your out of minimum contract that if on the off chance you need a new router you should buy one and not the ISP's but routers dont generally operate and intermittently develop a fault at the same time as every other router in your area.
To re-emphasise in this case I can almost gaurantee she doesnt need a new router along with the rest of carrigaline she needs communication of what the problem is at her local exchange ,whats been done to fix it and how long will it take.
I have no problem bashing Eircom because Eircom are a disgrace and until they clean up their act we should all continue to bash them.
By the way I live 3 miles from carrigaline on the ringaskiddy exchange where the locality are experienceing the same issue ,maybe we should all run out and buy new routers.

Mackey

:p Bottom line is - Eircom are rubbish and their Customer Service is non existent. They don't deserve any business!! I hope everyone changes to Vodafone as at least they have good Customer Service. Eircom break Contracts without even a phonecall. They charge you double for your monthly broadband and instead of contacting the customer to let them know they're changing their contract from 'Unlimited' to 30g, they just overcharge you. Absolute Robbers!! After 25 years of paying bills on time, every time, I am sick to death of them and hope they go down with a bang and all their customers leave them.

dub45

Mackey wrote: »

:p Bottom line is - Eircom are rubbish and their Customer Service is non existent. They don't deserve any business!! I hope everyone changes to Vodafone as at least they have good Customer Service. Eircom break Contracts without even a phonecall. They charge you double for your monthly broadband and instead of contacting the customer to let them know they're changing their contract from 'Unlimited' to 30g, they just overcharge you. Absolute Robbers!! After 25 years of paying bills on time, every time, I am sick to death of them and hope they go down with a bang and all their customers leave them.

I am sure the mods will have their views on resurrecting an old thread but if you want discussion on a post it really does help to provide chapter and verse rather than merely ranting.