How will IOLBB Compete

sillild

Smart telecom offering more than I have at the moment and all for €35pm as opposed to €26pm Line Rental and €47pm Broadband.

Will/Can they do any thing to Compete ?

sillild

Response (Customer Care) - 21/02/2005 11.23

Thank you for your email.

Please be advised that Esat BT will be launching a new Broadband product on the 9th March which will be the strongest offer available to the Irish Broadband market.

Unfortunately, I would not be able to go into detail about this product until this date.

I would advise you to wait until all options are available to you so you can make a fully informed decision.

Kind Regards


Esat BT
Customer Care Team
T: 1904
Mail: customer.care@esatbt.com


DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT THE NEW PRODUCT IS ?

DrChoda

sillild wrote:

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT THE NEW PRODUCT IS ?

Email replies to their customers with real answers of course!

There are a few things that bother me about this whole 'we're going to get better so stick around and find out' attitude.

1st, they should let you know what to expect, you are after all a paying customer.
-what you will most likely find out is that whatever it is (presuming slightly faster speeds) there will be 0 promo's for exisiting customers. They will prolly have something like free 3 months for non-exisiting customers, which will of course have an negative impact on your service if enough people in your area sign up due to contention ratio.

:mad: 2nd, it wouldn't be the first time I heard they were going to get better. March 9th? I won't hold my breath, and I certainly wouldn't be surprised if its only limited to select areas. 'I'm sorry sir but your area has not been upgraded, please stay with us though and we will be upgrading it sometime before everywhere else has fiber, in the meantime we will offer you nothing but crappy speeds for your loyalty.

:eek: 3rd, and IMHO is most important, it appears that it takes another company like SMART to get esat off their lazy duffs to provide better service (which is still below par even if they plan to upgrade). For that reason alone, I would switch to another company. I would switch even if it was the same price!
Esat appears to be taking the same road that errcom took: take more and give less.

I love nothing more than seeing companies with this type of customer service start to shake when a young innovative, fair priced company comes in undercutting the FAT BLOATED CATS.

(I'm actually surprised that there wasn't some regulation passed to keep this lower cost broadband from happening)

Gonzo

is this new offer from ESAT BT business broadband which is on limited exchanges or is it their residential iol broadband which is eircom resold? If they are bringing out a new package for their IOL brand then surely eircom have to upgrade first in order for iol to then upgrade, would be nice if this was true with eircom/iol and utv getting upgraded thoughout as all our packages are severly lacking and long overdue an upgrade.

SkepticOne

Gonzo wrote:

is this new offer from ESAT BT business broadband which is on limited exchanges or is it their residential iol broadband which is eircom resold? If they are bringing out a new package for their IOL brand then surely eircom have to upgrade first in order for iol to then upgrade, would be nice if this was true with eircom/iol and utv getting upgraded thoughout as all our packages are severly lacking and long overdue an upgrade.

The 'IOL' brand is currently based on resold Eircom bitstream DSL and the 'Esat Bt' brand broadband is based on Esat equipment operating in Eircom exchanges and catering the the business market. However, there is nothing to stop them using the their 'business' equipement in the Eircom exchanges to bring out a new consumer level service. They could market it under the the 'IOL' brand if they wish.

If they want to compete head-to-head with Smart they will need to make the product very cheap and have a phone service bundled with it. It will need to be faster than smart and not have restrictive caps but rather a fair use policy. They will also need to do extensive advertising.

This would be very unlike Esat to date, but the opportunity is available to them. Most likely they will just take whatever Eircom has to offer and resell that.

Gonzo

isnt their business equipment only in limited exchanges, around 40? if this was their route it would be on such a small scale that it would make very little impact?

My hoping is that they will upgrade their eircom resold residental package and that eircom will announce some sort of decent upgrade for everyone very soon and have it implemented during march.

Blaster99

Apart from Smart making a lot of noise and offering the best value product on paper on the market, what's the big deal at the end of the day? NTL and IBB already offer better value products than Eircom and co. It's not as if Smart will have a footprint worth talking about, at least not this year. Something like a quarter of Dublin and a few exchanges down the country? I suppose my point is that Eircom and IOL etc already sell a lot of connections in a market where they're the most expensive and already have similar competition from NTL and IBB and a few others. The level of competition is just increasing a bit, with Smart, NTL, IBB and others rolling out services, and Eircom etc will have to respond in time. Eircom is untouchable in terms of coverage so they will balance their price/performance against the level of competition across the board. I doubt they will undercut themselves much when they effectively have zippo competition in something like 75% of the market and the strongest brand in the market.

Jammer

eircom sell so much because, like u said, they have best coverage.

im in d15, cant get IBB, cant get NTL so i have to choose eircom. There are hundreds of thousands of people in my situation. At least 2,000 in my housing estate anyway.

Smart will be here in may/june, just when my IOLBB trial finishes. Good timing!

dlofnep

If Eircom think that they can still continue to run their monopoly of high prices and restricted services and have horrible customer service then they have another thing coming.

Eircom are greedy bastards and the sooner I get Smart Broadband the sooner I can cancel their piece of **** service.

I've e-mailed Esat also to see what sort of information I can get out of them. I haven't asked for specific details but I have asked if they can match or beat Smart's offer.

dlofnep

Thank you for your email.

Unfortunately, we would not be able to advise on details of the new Broadband offer until the 9th March 2005.

Esat BT apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Damnit, foiled.

joedublinka

dlofnep wrote:

If Eircom think that they can still continue to run their monopoly of high prices and restricted services and have horrible customer service then they have another thing coming.

Eircom are greedy bastards and the sooner I get Smart Broadband the sooner I can cancel their piece of **** service.

I've e-mailed Esat also to see what sort of information I can get out of them. I haven't asked for specific details but I have asked if they can match or beat Smart's offer.

actually eircoms service is very good. its their slightly high line rental/ **** caps on broadband/ slowish speeds for residential use that is the problem.

when u think about it and compare like with like BT in the UK are no better pricewise or capswise than eircom. all monopolys seek to maintain prices for as long as possible. take vodafone as an example. they have 54% of the irish mobile market yet o2 are cheaper and meteor are MUCH cheaper, as cheap as vodafones highest bill pay tariff on pay as u go yet with no line rental yet fools keep signing up with them.
its the same in the states with verizon, they are much dearer than other providers yet they have a majority market share.
nothing will change eircom unless there is mass migration to someone else. dont forget if smart can do it anyone can unbundle a line. smart arent the only ones. in fact it is a rather poorly financed company, of that we are sure. havent u asked yourself the question why esat or another well funded company doesnt start unbundling lines?

dlofnep

joedublinka wrote:

actually eircoms service is very good. its their slightly high line rental/ **** caps on broadband/ slowish speeds for residential use that is the problem.

when u think about it and compare like with like BT in the UK are no better pricewise or capswise than eircom.

Firstly, I said their service was restricted and that their "customer service" was poor. Also, there service has been very poor.. I had downtime of a month before a connection issue was resolved. An entire ****ing month. 30 odd phones calls. After being fobbed off the phone about 10 times.. And I should know, I work for an ISP. I was promised about 10 callbacks and I didn't get any of them. You call that good service?

Secondly, BT charge £24.99 (€36) a month for a 2meg service with a 15gig cap which comes with a freephone support helpline. Let's compare Eircom shall we?

Eircom broadband Home Plus (€54.45) - A 512k service with an 8 gig cap.

Please in your crazy insane world, tell me how they are in anyway, shape or form similiar.

Infact, the ISP that I work for distributes a 2meg uncapped service for £29.99 a month.

Eircom are money greedy bastards. They have a ****e service (it's ok when it works). poor customer support, high prices.. Etc.

DrChoda

joedublinka wrote:

actually eircoms service is very good. its their slightly high line rental/ **** caps on broadband/ slowish speeds for residential use that is the problem.

Are you by any chance slightly high yourself?? :eek:
How is their service good? They charge the highest and provide the crappiest.
Let's not forget just how many people there are in this country that can't even get a landline installed let alone broadband.
The more companies that come in like SMART offering better speeds for cheaper prices the greater it is for the consumer. It will force other financially bloated but stagnant companies to be more competitive.

I would be more interested in faster speeds, bigger 'caps' for a cheaper price, as long as it works. When the lines don't work, it seems to make it a bit more bitter when you're forking out the extra money just to be fobbed off by the customer service anways.