Fibre: Vodafone or Eircom?

iniall

crawler wrote: »

the service is unlimited....

**Most Vodafone broadband packages come with unlimited usage, subject to a 300GB fair usage policy (FUP). The FUP exists simply to allow Vodafone to contact a customer if we notice unusual usage that is driving very high internet traffic volumes, such as a PC virus. The service is truly unlimited and there is no charge and no service degradation of any sort that takes place for exceeding the 300GB FUP. The FUP simply exists to protect customers and gives Vodafone a means to contact them to help out if we notice something unusual.

Yes it's unlimited download, but the speed is capped at 28Mb.

crawler

iniall wrote: »

Yes it's unlimited download, but the speed is capped at 28Mb.

Nope - unless that's all the line can handle or someone selects a stable profile...

iniall

crawler wrote: »

Nope - unless that's all the line can handle or someone selects a stable profile...

Tell that to Vodafone. The rep told me that (despite their website telling me my line could handle up to 70Mb) my line could only handle up to 50Mb and probably wouldn't get near that. He also said that the speed would vary hugely at peak times, so I might be better off going for a guaranteed 28Mb, which would neither go up nor down, regardless of time of day.

ofcork

I suppose you could chance the up to 50mb and see what you get and if its bad switch to the 28 mb package, I was told up to 50mb and getting 47 or so constantly since.

naughto

ofcork wrote: »

I suppose you could chance the up to 50mb and see what you get and if its bad switch to the 28 mb package, I was told up to 50mb and getting 47 or so constantly since.

i was told by vd that the best i can ge is 30 down 8 up.

raymix

iniall wrote: »

Looks like eircom's similar plan is €60 a month (full price), compared to Vodafone's €44.50. Guess I'm sticking with VF and their strange capped broadband plan...

it's €35, most people don't care about having a landline. Almost half the price, lol.

iniall

Engineer arrived this morning to install fibre box. Took about an hour. Down 27Mb, Up 13Mb, Ping 25ms. Nowhere near 70Mb - or even 50Mb - but much better than ADSL speed of 4Mb.

naughto

iniall wrote: »

Engineer arrived this morning to install fibre box. Took about an hour. Down 27Mb, Up 13Mb, Ping 25ms. Nowhere near 70Mb - or even 50Mb - but much better than ADSL speed of 4Mb.

how far away are you from the cabneit?
i was told ill be on some thing the same speed wise,hopefully i get that.

iniall

naughto wrote: »

how far away are you from the cabneit?
i was told ill be on some thing the same speed wise,hopefully i get that.

I'm only about 150 metres away, so I was hoping for faster speeds. I wonder if the copper might be the problem, as on ADSL I was getting pretty low download speeds.

ED E

iniall wrote: »

Engineer arrived this morning to install fibre box. Took about an hour. Down 27Mb, Up 13Mb, Ping 25ms. Nowhere near 70Mb - or even 50Mb - but much better than ADSL speed of 4Mb.

13 Up is pretty good. Are you testing on wireless? Try wired?

iniall

ED E wrote: »

13 Up is pretty good. Are you testing on wireless? Try wired?

I am testing on wireless, yeah. The engineer said he was getting 40Mbps from the box and he was wired. My laptop doesn't have an ethernet port though, so I'll have to stay wireless.

naughto

it has to have and ethernet port
one like this

SpaceTime

iniall wrote: »

I'm only about 150 metres away, so I was hoping for faster speeds. I wonder if the copper might be the problem, as on ADSL I was getting pretty low download speeds.

You might not be so close in terms of wiring though.
It could be taking the scenic route from the cabinet to your house.

iniall

naughto wrote: »

it has to have and ethernet port
one like this

No it does not have to have an ethernet port.

http://store.apple.com/ie/mac/family/macbook-air

iniall

SpaceTime wrote: »

You might not be so close in terms of wiring though.
It could be taking the scenic route from the cabinet to your house.

Yeah it's 150 metres as the crow flies, so who knows what twists and turns the wires take. So near and yet so far...

naughto

iniall wrote: »

I'm only about 150 metres away, so I was hoping for faster speeds. I wonder if the copper might be the problem, as on ADSL I was getting pretty low download speeds.

you r150 meters away iam about 650 meters away from my cabnet yet we are still getting the same speed.how does that work?

LillySV

i put in my order for vodafone fibre over 8-9 days ago...they told me at the time that eircom had to conect the house for them but it would be done in 10 days max...noone has even contacted me to arrange it yet and when i ring vodafone about this i get fobbed off...absolutely terrible customer service by a crowd that should be tryin to encourage me to get connected!!im really really startin to rethink about how bad upc was...might stay with em

SpaceTime

UPC were pretty excellent in my experience of them!
Never had any bother with them and found they generally responded to tech issues very fully and quite rapidly.

Bear in mind with Vodafone they're basically sending service request to eircom wholesale via a standardised system. So, they're probably waiting for responses.

Also, because the rollout's on-going, the crews are pretty busy. They're doing a hell of a lot of new installs.

Two family members have had efibre installed and it's taken 2 weeks in one case and 6 in another!

LillySV

SpaceTime wrote: »

UPC were pretty excellent in my experience of them!
Never had any bother with them and found they generally responded to tech issues very fully and quite rapidly.

Bear in mind with Vodafone they're basically sending service request to eircom wholesale via a standardised system. So, they're probably waiting for responses.

Also, because the rollout's on-going, the crews are pretty busy. They're doing a hell of a lot of new installs.

Two family members have had efibre installed and it's taken 2 weeks in one case and 6 in another!

i rang vodafone a month in advance of gettin upc out and they said they would ring back closer to the time...never did so rang them and the girl was very rude and said i wasnt on system anddidnt wana help at all..got through to a guy after who was nice and guaranteed install within 10 days....thats gone by in a day or so....no one contacted me or conected me since...rang again and they said they would check next mon(which will be 11 days!)i could try blame the eircom side of things but it seems as if vodafone have more questions to answer about their service than anyone else

raymix

Just found out from Eircom resellers (that shall remain anonymous), that Eircom is also selling Simple Fibre 70Mbps connection for €40, it's not on their website because they still want to enforce you to pay for landline for whatever reasons. Basically if you are mobile user and don't care about landline, you can save €20 on this. This is not their "first 6 months cheaper" crap. Basically extra €5 on top of similiar vodafone's offer, just no questionable FUP enforced.

Hope someone finds this helpful.

BArra

well if its not on the eircom website i would expect they would simply put you on the package including landline, surprise on the first bill and a headache for them to amend

wouldnt trust it unless it was in black and white

daithaiX

I normally don't post but feel I have to add my experience with Eircom. I'm in IT for over 10 years and have always avoided Eircom like the plague and advised customers also. Every experience I've ever had, has been bad to put it mildly. Recently, a colleague mentioned how great eFibre is and his experiences tus far. I'm currently a Smart Telecom/Digiweb customer and have been for over 5 years without issue. I'm on their 25MB package but my line will only support 8MB at best. I checked on Eircom's site and eFibre is available in my area so I decided to take a chance. I ordered the unlimited package via the website and was looking forward to getting my new package. I received an email confirming this but noticed an issue straight away, wrong package confirmed on the email. Rang Eircom and advised this, turns out the wrong number was also on my order, which I inputted via their site, go figure. They advised that it must be escalated to fix this, someone will contact me within 5 working days. The next day a letter from Eircom arrived advising: "Your appointment date is th and the technician will arrive between 1pm and 5pm." Confused as to when "th" is, I called to confirm when my installation would take place. Case escalated and someone will contact my in 5 working days. Six weeks later and a weekly call and five escalations later, I called again. (I got into a routine of calling once a week once the 5 working days where up.) Finally I got an honest answer, they messed up my order, did someone not contact me? Then I was advised that they need to cancel the order on their end and re-process. Then the nail in the coffin came, this would take 20 working days to cancel the order then they could re-process, all this after their mistake. At this point I told them where they could go and never to call me, I would like to say again but they have never called me back anyway. I was then told he would need to put me through to cancelations for me to confirm that I'm cancelling my order. After a lengthly conversation about they cancelling my order and my saying I don't want them to reprocess my order, I had to confirm that I was cancelling my, Eircom already cancelled, order. Since then I've order a Vodafone package which is better value for better package, I just didn't realise they were available in my area. This has been ordered since Monday this week and I've been advised that it could take up to 2-3 weeks as switching from Digiweb is not straight forward.

I gave Eircom every chance, 6 weeks is pretty patient and only lost my cool after the last conversation. I also informed the very first agent I spoke to about my past experiences with Eircom and my hope that they would prove to have changed their ways.

Sorry about the long post

iniall

Have to say - so far - Vodafone experience has been good. I ordered fibre from them on a Monday and it was all installed and working by the Friday. I was upgrading from Vodafone ADSL, though, which probably explains the speed of the process.

bk

daithaiX I would guess that the issue with Eircom is that switching from Smart isn't straight forward.

Smart use Local Loop Unbundling, which means they have their own DSLAMS in your local exchange and your telephone line runs directly into this Smart DSLAM rather then an Eircom DSLAM as it does for probably 95% of people.

So when you switch off of Smart to Eircom/Vodafone/Magnet eFibre an Eircom engineer has to go to the exchanges and disconnect your line from the Smart DSLAM and connect your line to the Eircom VDSL cab and phone connector too in the exchange. A bunch of other tricky things have to happen in the background too.

That is no excuse for the bad customer support you received from Eircom, but just to explain that if you are moving from Smart, you might have to be a little more patient, with Vodafone too.

SpaceTime

Yeah the whole LLU switching offices is a bit of a mess .

They've largely sorted out switching TO an LLU provider but I'm hearing lots of issues switching back again.

The issue with smart would be more about getting the number ported back again.

In general I find eircom technical support and customer care good (especially contracted online either via their own forum or live text chat).

The big problem I have with them is their sales unit. I find they usually know less about the product than a random person on the street knows and they are too pushy which results in lots of issues in my experience.

daithaiX

I understand the issues switching but to be told another 3 weeks to cancel and then a further 2-3 weeks to reprocess after 6 weeks of already waiting is having a laugh.

SpaceTime

We've found that often lines and services go live almost immediately after they order them but their customer service system has no idea the job has completed for days / weeks after!

It's quite weird actually

I've seen that on a few ADSL and voice orders where the local AXE or E10 exchange activated all services within a few hours of the order and the helpline were baffled as to why it was active and were expecting much much slower turn around times for some reason.

They seem to put worst case scenario times on everything.

ED E

SpaceTime wrote: »

We've found that often lines and services go live almost immediately after they order them but their customer service system has no idea the job has completed for days / weeks after!

It's quite weird actually

I've seen that on a few ADSL and voice orders where the local AXE or E10 exchange activated all services within a few hours of the order and the helpline were baffled as to why it was active and were expecting much much slower turn around times for some reason.

They seem to put worst case scenario times on everything.

Eircom Wholesale put a huge window on any jumpering job, and it can be done any time within that window, so wait times vary a lot. Then you get insitus that change over night.

berettaman

berettaman wrote: »

Hi LillySV,

They said they would connect in about a month. I will let you know how it goes. I will deffo do a speed test and let you know..

Still very sceptical as I expect to eircom yo put a spanner in the works. We shall see..;)

I posted Earlier in this thread that I was switching from Eircom... I signed up to VF on the 18.09.13. Well the spanner in the works has appeared. Eircom are not releasing the line... I don't know what that means as I am still trying to talk to a human but I knew it would be too good to be true..:rolleyes:

LillySV

berettaman wrote: »

I posted Earlier in this thread that I was switching from Eircom... I signed up to VF on the 18.09.13. Well the spanner in the works has appeared. Eircom are not releasing the line... I don't know what that means as I am still trying to talk to a human but I knew it would be too good to be true..:rolleyes:

the only hope you have of speaking to anyone in vodafone after they have taken your order and payment details is to chat to the vodafone reps here...ive only found that out as of today!!im getting some sort of a response now rather than before where i rang for over an hour every day and got nowhere!!their customer service up to now has been a disgrace and bordering on a scam as they have my debit card details for a service i still havent got and still dont know if they are gona try charge me for nothing or hold me into a contract....i am so so sorry i tried vodafone...