Eir Broadband 29.99, 12 month contract

peckerhead

Muahahaha wrote: »

Word of advice for solving the hassle of dealing with Eir (or any other telco)- if they dont answer their phone and you've given it three or four, maybe five attempts then dont waste any more of your time trying and get on to Comreg to complain. Far better customer service there, they take your complaint/issue and dispatch it to an escalation manager in the company who then has 10 days to respond (not quick I know but you actually get a response).

Id similar problems getting through to Vodafone last year. Had no internet and think I rang them somewhere in the order of about 20 times over 4 weeks with nobody answering the phone, left around 10 requests for call backs which never ever came. In the end rang Comreg and they helped sort the problem. Thats what I'll be doing from now on with telcos, theres no point pulling your hair out for weeks on end.

^^ This x1,000.

In the case of Eir, though, I'd agree with the chorus of people here speaking from experience and saying "walk away, it's not worth it no matter what the offer is". I'm a tenacious old bastard when it comes to getting past bad customer service, but I throw my hat at Eir. I will never go with them again.

todolist

Comreg were useless when i had problems with vodafone.Customer service in Ireland is abysmal in all major companies.I have had dreadful service from Vodafone,Virgin media.The one common denominator is the customer service is useless.People reading off a script and not a clue how to resolve issues.Trust me, Eir isn't the only villain.

Bbnaas

Have had eir efibre for few years. Experienced random and frequent drops in service for a year plus. I eventually diagnosed it to be their DNS servers causing the issues - once I pointed those to opendns on the router it’s been working perfectly since

Muahahaha

todolist wrote: »

Comreg were useless when i had problems with vodafone.Customer service in Ireland is abysmal in all major companies.I have had dreadful service from Vodafone,Virgin media.The one common denominator is the customer service is useless.People reading off a script and not a clue how to resolve issues.Trust me, Eir isn't the only villain.

Thats the complete opposite experience I had with Comreg when I couldnt get through to Vodafone for weeks on end. I had to ring Comreg about four times in total to get the problem resolved and each time they answered the phone in less than 20 seconds, you gave them your case reference number and that avoided having to explain the problem for the umpteenth time as they had it all logged. They got on to Vodafone to do something about it, it took about two weeks but eventually I got a call from a Vodafone escalations manager and she held her hands up, admitted their call centre was having problems and then offered to give 50% off my bill for the remainder of the contract which still had 18 of 24 months to run. I was happy with that so took it.

If I have this sh1t again of any telecoms company not answering their phone after several attempts I wont be wasting any more of my time and just head straight to Comreg, its the only thing that seems to work at least in my experience anyway.

DopeTech

Comreg seems powerless over a lot of things. My wife was with Tesco and having lots of issues and they couldn't do anything.

sheepsh4gger

TheDriver wrote: »

Eir seems to have cracking deal. If you go through one big switch, its free activation and 50 back. I know Eir is annoying to deal with but can't argue with price

Stay away from that ISP, it's the worst in Ireland. Use Virgin Media if you can, even the cheapest 200Mb/s package is light years ahead of DSL.


DSL (broadband over phone lines) is inherently bad to begin with. Your 'fiber' modem is not really fiber. It just means that instead of them running a long cable to the local phone exchange (where the receiving modem lives, also called a DSLAM) they run a phone cable to the green box on the street. The cabinet itself is the 'exchange'. That's all good in theory but in practice the stretch of phone cable from the road cabinet to your actual home modem is anything but good. Phone lines are always a 'rats nest' and it's usually the customer's/landlord's fault. The quality of joints is poor, you have rain water dripping onto everything etc.



If you want to use Eir then only if they can give you a true fiber NTU (network termination unit - socket on the wall the modem connects to)


Also if you have broadband over a phone line then there's lots of stuff in your house that can mess it up, say a Sky box, a stationary phone. With DSL it's typical to have the broadband cut out when someone phones you. Only use full digital telephony - where you connect your handsets to the modem not directly onto the line.



Also Eircom has far more outages than Virgin. Also there are often configuration issues on their network like your modem not being able to get an IP and therefore not working.



Apart from the hardware connection itself being inherently problematic (poor physical line means dropping connection, slow speed etc.) there's a number of ISP level problems inherent only to Eircom:
- The modems are extremely cheap, say if you look at the yellow ports you can see some golden pins are missing for cost reduction, they don't last long
- when the modems die often they are 'half dead' where they will do odd random things with the lights which makes it extremely hard to troubleshoot and prove to their support it's broken
- The modem firmware is poorly botched together, you might remember when their modems were getting hacked because they left the management ports open:
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/eir-customers-broadband-modem-hack

(the firmware update supposedly provided wasn't new, they lied to the press)

- They push firmware updates the first time you take the modem out of its box and connect it to a phone line. This takes maybe 15 minutes. If you switch the modem off and on while the update is running then the modem is 'bricked', gone forever - as good as a door stop.

sheepsh4gger

uhassan wrote: »

I signed up for same offer a month ago and then cancelled within the 14 days cool-off period after 6 calls with technical support and no connection. Each person I talked to had a different story about the problem.

I was told that there would be not charge since I didn't get any service. But still was charged a few euros.

Avoid Eir if possible not a good experience to deal with.

Yes, that's typical Eircom. Say your onening a restaurant and need 3 phone lines:
- 1 analog for the elevator (required by law)
- 1 stand-alone broadband line for customer wireless/advertising
- 1 stand-alone broadband line for credit card broadband, email, DVR and main phone (VOIP)



After 2 months of struggle you will get maybe 2 working lines, with one being completely unuseable. There will be something weird like a red internet light on one of the lines and regardless of how many times you call them nothing will be solved.


Eventually you will need to call them again, order a 4th line. This one will be working fine and you will need to cancel the one with the red light.


In contrast Virgin are much more pro. They fully test the quality of the connection and need to submit the readings on a company phone. The same day you will get a working internet connection. You can phone them up, ask for a static IP and within 2 hours you will get it with no fuss.

sheepsh4gger

yankinlk wrote: »

Dont do it. They area disaster in the billing dept. Every month the bill goes up a little bit more for no reason.

Their support is bad before covid, no one answers but bots, no tickets or calls back, no way to track issues.

They will only call you the day AFTER you switch to another provider to try and get you back.

Yes, only the sales department is always fully staffed

sheepsh4gger

machiavellianme wrote: »

I'm with Eir and live within 6 km of the Dublin City centre. Yesterday, my download speed was 0.18MB while I tried to join my team on a conference call, despite allegedly being on a 10MB plan. Fibre has allegedly been coming in the next 6 months since 2013. They are hopeless to deal with.

Check that you dont' have the DSL splitter the wrong way around. (Phone goes to phone symbol, computer goes to computer symbol - if you connect them the wrong way around that's where you get brutally slow DSL)

sheepsh4gger

Soarer wrote: »

Do they still use the rubbish router they were using a couple of years back?
Could only handle up to 16 wireless devices.

It's even worse now. They have a new line of modems now and the firmware is f'd as usual.

Eireann81

ratracer wrote: »

As a counter - I’ve had Eir FTTH for the last 2 and a half years. I’ve never had any major issues. Technical chat has been able to diagnose and fix the two or three issues I had, including sorting out a failed modem. Granted the online chat can sometimes take an hour, but it got any issue I had sorted. Now I’m still on the €59/mth contract, so need to look at getting that changed when current contract runs out.

I also have Eir FTTH. Worked fine for the first year. Renewed contract after year 1, but upgraded to 300MB for €5 more (€45/month instead of €40/month). Every month for the past 5 months, my bill has been wrong - usually €65/month. Everytime I ring up and they fix it for the following month but then it goes back to €65/month afterwards. I've lost count of the number of hours I've spent on the phone and online chat with Eir over the past 2 years.

Deagol

Avoid Eir like it's the plague!

Had them for a few years on VDSL2 and it worked well but when I had a problem they insisted on my signing up for a new 18 month contract to get a replacement modem. Once I did this I never actually got the new modem but mysteriously the problem disappeared... make what you will of that.

But the biggest disaster was when I tried to move homes. I asked them to disconnect service in one house on November 9th 2019 and activate it the new house on the same date.

Came down one morning and found I had no broadband - took me while to figure it out (while on a long hold with their 'technical' dept) - the date was OCT 9th 2019...

When they confirmed that they had started the switch on the wrong date i asked them to correct it and restart my BB at the house and they told me they couldn't! I'd have to wait until November 9th in the new house to have BB!!!

I eventually got a sales guy to admit they best solution would be to change providers!!!

So I did, and went straight to the bank and cut the DD off. Good job I did.

They then sent me a letter dated a week before demanding the modem back (which was at least 5 years old) within a week or they'd charge me €90 - I'd have needed a time machine to not get stung.

Then when I moved to the new house they started to bill me for a service I never had from them - remember I'd gone with a new provider.

I still get monthly bills from them for around €230.

And it doesn't end there, I tried to ring to get it sorted out and their automated phone system demands my account number - but when I enter the account number listed on the bill the system tells me no such account exists.

I cannot understand how any company can exist that is just so totally incompetent - and surely no one is foolish enough to switch to them having heard the huge numbers of stories? I certainly wouldn't go back to them even if they were giving away free BB.

Yamanoto

You signed an 18 month contract to get a new modem?

Mother of God.

_Kaiser_

I fully agree that eir customer service and billing is shocking when something goes bad, but nothing a call to Comreg can't sort out in my experience.

The product itself is pretty rock solid though and the price makes it worth the risk IMO. Had it 2 years (again) and not had to call them bar 2 calls to get the discount/offer I agreed to sorted.

Lionse

I signed up to the 29. 99 deal. The house has an existing Fibre line going it so all the technician who came out had to do was to plug in the new modem. My first bill has arrived for 146 euro! I was charged connection fees and other charges. Got no satisfaction though firstly with someone on phone and the following day through web chat.
Seemingly it doesn't matter if there is an existing fibre connection to the house or not the same charges apply. Crazy stuff

sheepsh4gger

I hope Starlink will put Eircom out of business.

Ush1

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

I fully agree that eir customer service and billing is shocking when something goes bad, but nothing a call to Comreg can't sort out in my experience.

The product itself is pretty rock solid though and the price makes it worth the risk IMO. Had it 2 years (again) and not had to call them bar 2 calls to get the discount/offer I agreed to sorted.

It's definitely not rock solid where I live in Dublin. Engineers came out 4 or 5 times and still dropouts so switched to Virgin and no problems since.

deadl0ck

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

I fully agree that eir customer service and billing is shocking when something goes bad, but nothing a call to Comreg can't sort out in my experience.

Can you elaborate a bit more on this ? I may need it myself soon.....

I just signed up with them a few weeks for basic mobile broadband for my mother. I was going for the 14.99 30 day rolling contract as I had no idea how the coverage would be etc.

Anyhow - within 5 mins of signing up I got an email saying I had successfully signed up to the 30 day contract @52.99 per month:

Bundle Name:	Standalone eir Wireless Broadband	
			
Your Bundle Includes:	eir Wireless Broadband 2020 30 Day Contract
	
Bundle Contract Length*:	12 Months	
		
Promotional Price:	€52.99 per month	
		
Regular Price:	€52.99 per month

They don't even have a 52.99 contract.

I have to wait a few days before they could fix the price as they could not change the bill amount until the Sim was activated. It took MANY phone calls to get it sorted, and I haven't got my first bill yet so I'm waiting to see if it's actually been fixed......

Edit - aspparently I'm due the bill today - I just logged on online to the account:

Welcome to eir
Your bill has not yet been issued
Your balance on account XXXXXXXX
Your first bill will be issued on:
26 Apr 2020

Apart from that I can't see any info of the amount they are about to charge me....

KildareP

To be honest most of the big players are as bad as each other.

Virgin are by no means the saviour from Eir and I've had major issues with them before while I have had zero problems using a VDSL connection for the last 3+ years:
- They have the worst traffic routing of any ISP in Ireland - most traffic routes via Amsterdam even if it is going to a datacentre down the road. They've had major issues as a result of this in the past with Youtube and Netflix when their Amsterdam links become congested.
- They have a half-baked setup for IPv6 that breaks a lot of VPNs, often causes issues with VoIP and prevents you port forwarding anything from outside because you do not get a public IPv4 address
- They push "features" without any prior notification and no acknowledgement and no rollback when it causes problems - WiFree and "Smart WiFi" being two examples
- Their latest modem suffers from the Intel Puma chipset flaw which causes huge latency and can render online gaming useless
- They routinely allocate blocks of IP addresses registered to other countries to Irish customers, without updating the geo-lookup information, meaning many services think you're located somewhere outside of Ireland. From something as simple as your Google results returning in Dutch, to streaming services not working at all because they think you're in a country they don't have a license for the content or service you want.
- Virgin's cable network is very small in comparison to Eir's so has been easier to tend to and invest in over the past. Virgin simply don't exist outside of major cities. Virgin is not an option for the vast majority of people in Ireland.

sheepsh4gger wrote: »

Stay away from that ISP, it's the worst in Ireland. Use Virgin Media if you can, even the cheapest 200Mb/s package is light years ahead of DSL.


DSL (broadband over phone lines) is inherently bad to begin with. Your 'fiber' modem is not really fiber. It just means that instead of them running a long cable to the local phone exchange (where the receiving modem lives, also called a DSLAM) they run a phone cable to the green box on the street. The cabinet itself is the 'exchange'. That's all good in theory but in practice the stretch of phone cable from the road cabinet to your actual home modem is anything but good. Phone lines are always a 'rats nest' and it's usually the customer's/landlord's fault. The quality of joints is poor, you have rain water dripping onto everything etc.



If you want to use Eir then only if they can give you a true fiber NTU (network termination unit - socket on the wall the modem connects to)


Also if you have broadband over a phone line then there's lots of stuff in your house that can mess it up, say a Sky box, a stationary phone. With DSL it's typical to have the broadband cut out when someone phones you. Only use full digital telephony - where you connect your handsets to the modem not directly onto the line.



Also Eircom has far more outages than Virgin. Also there are often configuration issues on their network like your modem not being able to get an IP and therefore not working.



Apart from the hardware connection itself being inherently problematic (poor physical line means dropping connection, slow speed etc.) there's a number of ISP level problems inherent only to Eircom:
- The modems are extremely cheap, say if you look at the yellow ports you can see some golden pins are missing for cost reduction, they don't last long
- when the modems die often they are 'half dead' where they will do odd random things with the lights which makes it extremely hard to troubleshoot and prove to their support it's broken
- The modem firmware is poorly botched together, you might remember when their modems were getting hacked because they left the management ports open:
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/eir-customers-broadband-modem-hack

(the firmware update supposedly provided wasn't new, they lied to the press)

- They push firmware updates the first time you take the modem out of its box and connect it to a phone line. This takes maybe 15 minutes. If you switch the modem off and on while the update is running then the modem is 'bricked', gone forever - as good as a door stop.

Grumpypants

I went back to Eir. If nothing goes wrong it is fine. If you need help, especially with billing they are a disaster.

I initially was with them at €90 a month (internet and TV), they wouldn't offer an incentive to stay so I moved to Vodafone at €70 a month. Now I'm back to Eir at €39.99. 150mb plus TV. Hard to beat that price.

Apple box for TV, free Apple TV for a year, free Amazon Prime for a year, free Eir Sports.

The router is pants, needs to be reset once a week. I reset the Vodafone one twice in 12 months.

At the end of this I'll be back to Vodafone. I keep moving to stay on the intro prices. They give €25 for 6 months so it works out around €45 a month. I think my Eir will just to €90 after 12 months.

Grumpypants

Grumpypants wrote: »

I went back to Eir. If nothing goes wrong it is fine. If you need help, especially with billing they are a disaster.

I initially was with them at €90 a month (internet and TV), they wouldn't offer an incentive to stay so I moved to Vodafone at €70 a month. Now I'm back to Eir at €39.99. 150mb plus TV. Hard to beat that price.

Apple box for TV, free Apple TV for a year, free Amazon Prime for a year, free Eir Sports.

The router is pants, needs to be reset once a week. I reset the Vodafone one twice in 12 months.

At the end of this I'll be back to Vodafone. I keep moving to stay on the intro prices. They give €25 for 6 months so it works out around €45 a month. I think my Eir will just to €90 after 12 months.

Are they still doing the free Apple TV box?

okidoki987

Ush1 wrote: »

It's definitely not rock solid where I live in Dublin. Engineers came out 4 or 5 times and still dropouts so switched to Virgin and no problems since.

Virgin are much better all right but their prices are too dear for what you are getting and they make little effort to reduce them when others cut their broadband prices.

Ten Pin

Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I may need it myself soon.....

I just signed up with them a few weeks for basic mobile broadband for my mother. I was going for the 14.99 30 day rolling contract as I had no idea how the coverage would be etc.

IMO yoo'd be better of cancelling that after the initial 30 days or sooner if it's less than 14 days (cooling off).

There's options for PAYG plans with more data....Vodafone & Eir have options for 20e per 28 days. It's a fiver extra compared to the plan you ordered but it will save you a mountain of hassle if Eir don't fix the billing issue straight away (and the chances of them making it worse are fairly high). There'll be no bill to bother about either.

There are other PAYG options with 48 and Tesco for 10e and 15e respectively but maybe investigate those over the following weeks.

Mobile broadband is just another way for networks to charge more for data and is unnecessary when phone plans have plenty of data included.

witnessmenow

Deleted User wrote: »

Are they still doing the free Apple TV box?

I recently moved house and they mentioned that their new TV service is all based around the Apple TV

crank_1975

Is there any risk (other than the risk of using Eir in the first place) of loss of service doing a switch? I am wfh and can't afford to be offline at all.

Grumpypants

Deleted User wrote: »

Are they still doing the free Apple TV box?

Yeah, Eir TV is now an App on Apple TV box. The Apple box is not very user friendly. The Remote has this awful square that you have to swipe on to move around. The missus and mother in law can't use it. So most of my time is spent going in to change the channel for them. :pac:

If your TV supports it your TV remote should start working through the HDMI to control the box, this might need to be turned on.

But you can stick Netflix, Disney +, eir TV, Youtube, Amazon Prime, RTE Player, All 4, etc on the one box so it cuts down the flicking around with HDMI's.

crank_1975 wrote: »

Is there any risk (other than the risk of using Eir in the first place) of loss of service doing a switch? I am wfh and can't afford to be offline at all.

There is always a risk. Mine was off for a little while, maybe an hour, I was at work and it just started working through the Vodafone router which was nice. So it was all on when I got home again.

I changed to the Eir router when I got home, I think I'll go back. Only thing holding me back is I updated all the smart devices to the new wi-fi and that is a bit of a pain.

codie

To tell you the truth if Eir paid me €29.99 a month to take their broadband I wouldn't take it.
All jokes aside I wouldn't. For anyone even considering, for your own sanity don't do it.

E30i

crank_1975 wrote: »

Is there any risk (other than the risk of using Eir in the first place) of loss of service doing a switch? I am wfh and can't afford to be offline at all.

YES be very careful I'm the same and had ordered a switch on 26th march. I ordered that at start of March before any restrictions etc.

I was without a landline from 26th March until 14th April and that involved 14 phone calls to customer 'care' until I stumbled across an agent who took responsibility for the mess and resolved it successfully on 14th April as I outlined.

BEWARE

I know other providers can have issues also

deadl0ck

Ten Pin wrote: »

IMO yoo'd be better of cancelling that after the initial 30 days or sooner if it's less than 14 days (cooling off).

There's options for PAYG plans with more data....Vodafone & Eir have options for 20e per 28 days. It's a fiver extra compared to the plan you ordered but it will save you a mountain of hassle if Eir don't fix the billing issue straight away (and the chances of them making it worse are fairly high). There'll be no bill to bother about either.

There are other PAYG options with 48 and Tesco for 10e and 15e respectively but maybe investigate those over the following weeks.

Mobile broadband is just another way for networks to charge more for data and is unnecessary when phone plans have plenty of data included.

Interestingly I just checked my online banking to see what direct debits are set up and there is none from Eir set up (although it may not show up until the first payment is made).

Grumpypants

If you already have the instalation done (moving from another provider) , they will wave the €100 too. I just got them to post the router and box and plugged it in.