Threat of moving to a competitor

h0stn0tf0und

Reading several threads both here on Boards and on newsgroups there are a lot of unhappy customers. UTV customers unhappy with customer service and download caps and IOL customers have concerns about the latter as well. A lot of people are annoyed, myself included and I personally am thinking of changing provider. The worrying thing is that UTV/IOL don’t seem to care. Reading the other threads about customers speaking to representatives of both companies, there is no attempt being made to retain your custom.

Are the companies of the mindset that people wont change because of the time/effort involved and that in their minds, there is no real alternative? I find this all frustrating and taking up way too much of my time!

Any opinions?

markyboy

A nice screenshot of you entering your phone test for Smart Telecom as an attachment might annoy them even more

muckwarrior

As far as I can see almost NOBODY is entirely happy with their broadband service. Maybe the ISPs think that nobody will bother changing coz the competition are all equally crap!

cregser

There's a conspiracy theory that eircom didn't give IOL/UTV enough notice of the upgrades so they were kinda unprepared for handling the extra bandwidth. Considering IOL/UTV operate at lower profit margins to eircom, they are gonna be at a disadvantage for these kinda things.

About 14-15 months ago I was no fan of IOLBB. But after about 12months of solid service, I'm willing to give them time to sort this out.

But if/when NTL and Smart come to my area I'll have another think about it.

leeroybrown

Given the uptake rates for broadband, I think the big problem for 50% plus of people is that they're still tied into a contract with an ISP that they can't break out of.

Another reason not to leave is that if your 12 month contract has ended you're generally placed on a monthly rolling contract allowing you the option to opt out and move to better package with no penalty. Sometimes it's not worth tying yourself into a marginally better package for 12 months when you can retain the option to move to a substantially better one immediately if the chance arises.

cregser wrote:

There's a conspiracy theory that eircom didn't give IOL/UTV enough notice of the upgrades so they were kinda unprepared for handling the extra bandwidth.

Regardless of the bandwidth/technical issues there is very little excuse for an ISP to delay updating it's package information until after the upgrade has taken place as UTV did. They've had this information for plenty of time to get their PR work done right.

Terra

I'm strongly thinking about leaving utv and going back to eircom...

especially now that they have the same caps.

Although I'd hate to be with eircom...but they seem to be better for games and just reliable speeds.

Is there any isp's better then eircom at the moment and also have widespread availablilty

julius

If iolBB & UTV dont upgrade their CAP's (the only aspect of BB they have control of) then they will hemorage thousands of customers between them to eircom!!!

UTV will be worst hit due to their stringent enforcement of CAPS.

But iolBB will also suffer due to the "possibly" better broadband service as it will travel entirely through the eircom network.

IMHO UTV and iolBB were the bastion of the more technically minded broadband users(higher CAP's!) with most of the general public going to eircom for home BB.

To hold onto their current customer base as well as future clients iolBB and UTV must double their CAP's...there can be no other response to eircoms latest assault.

Sully

Im going once a better provider arrives. Why? Just generaly not happy with UTV and im looking for more freedom with the cap.

Its annoying that, if I have problems with UTV I cant call them about it.

BigO

Terra wrote:

Is there any isp's better then eircom at the moment and also have widespread availablilty

Well its expensive but other than that it is a good service & i think i'll noly believe smart when I see it because it think its a bit of a red herring, It may look great on paper but till people start using it, its only hear say

julius

SMART will probable have all of the same problems currently associated with this eircom bitstream "upgrade".

A 2048/128 connection is just too lopsided and should at least have an upload of 256 to alleviate some of the problems.

IMHO UTV are going to feel the heat in the next month and without a CAP doubling from iolBB, eircom will get a renaissance of new customers signing up which will just reinforce their monopoly!!!

OfflerCrocGod

julius wrote:

IMHO UTV are going to feel the heat in the next month and without a CAP doubling from iolBB, eircom will get a renaissance of new customers signing up which will just reinforce their monopoly!!!

Well IOL will be announcing the new cap later on this month so we will see.

Terra

You know eircom probably couldn't have picked a better time too, my year is nearly up with utv, and I'd say it's the case with many of it's customers

Couch Potato

I cannot believe that there is still no "Official" announcement from UTV to their customers regarding the upgrade. All that I have heard about is people posting in the UTV newsgroups.

The upgrade has gone horribly wrong for me this weekend - I had to re-configure my wireless router from scratch following several disconnects/hangs etc.

I am getting d/l speeds of 300k-1.3mb on both the utv speedtest and the irishisptest sites... the d/l speeds are all over the place.

Forget calling customer service ...

I suspect that they just don't currently have the bandwidth to support the upgrades for their customers...

Pretty pissed off - I am at the end of my 12 month contract and am waiting to see what other providers are going to offer before moving.

UTV the silence is deafening..

rant over ...

julius

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

Well IOL will be announcing the new cap later on this month so we will see.

Thats still very much speculation at this stage.

Graham A just put that in as a stalling tactic so that when peoples contracts run out this month they wont immediately hop to eircom.

Unless of course you got this from another source....please more info?

bk

julius wrote:

Thats still very much speculation at this stage.

Graham A just put that in as a stalling tactic so that when peoples contracts run out this month they wont immediately hop to eircom.

Unless of course you got this from another source....please more info?

Well I haven't heard anything but it does make sense.

You see Eircom announced the speed upgrades only three weeks ago, yet it takes at least 6 weeks for companies like IOL to order more backhaul. Therefore IOL won't want people going mad with downloads until they have more backhaul in place.

As I said it is just a theory, I haven't heard anything, but to anyone with IOL I would say give them a month and wait and see what happens.

bk

Actually Netsource do seem to care about losing customers.

I called them last week to cancel BB as I'm movig to NTL cable BB and when I informed the sales person that I wanted to cancel, see asked me to hold while see put me onto a more senior sales person who asked me why I was leaving, did I know that they where uping the speeds and that they would drop the price of my BB from €66 to €54 if I stayed.

I said no thanks.

damien

bk wrote:

Therefore IOL won't want people going mad with downloads until they have more backhaul in place.

I thought Esat/IOL had their own proper fibre going into the interconnectors (or whatever they're called) so backhaul for them isn't an issue though it may be for the other resellers.

padraigf

Apparently they dont since i was getting 150ms pings to boards.ie last night and 40kB a second downloads.

L5

padraigf wrote:

Apparently they dont since i was getting 150ms pings to boards.ie last night and 40kB a second downloads.

im getting 30-40kbs downloads now where before i always got 50-53kbs.
Sort it out IOL

bk

damien.m wrote:

I thought Esat/IOL had their own proper fibre going into the interconnectors (or whatever they're called) so backhaul for them isn't an issue though it may be for the other resellers.

It depends, the last time I read the Eircom docs there were two options:

1) All traffic from every Eircom ADSL Regional pop (there are 11) is backhauled on the Eircom network to every other ADSL regional POP and the Access Seeker (e.g. Esat) can take the traffic off which ever POP they like. In this case they have to order the backhaul off of Eircom.

2) The access seeker connects to each ADSL Regional pop and backhauls the traffic themselves.

I'm not sure how Esat do it.

What is interesting is that it seems Eircom haven't updated the "Bitstream Connection Service Product Description" doc yet for the new prodcuts. This is the doc that describes how you can access the Bitstream services, it still only mentions the 512k products, this leaves big questions open to how the other operators can access the new products.

I'd say that the OLO's where caught cold by this upgrade and are still a few weeks from having everything set up properly.

IANOC

i wasnt particularly a fan of eircom when i left IBB to join them.
but since i have not had one problem and am 100% satisfied!!
now id heard they were cowboys when it came to customer service/tech support.
now , not just because of the upgrades , im thouroughly satisfied with them as when the upgrades were taking place , i rang about my speeds being around the 56k mark and it was fixed within the hour and they also called me back twice to confirm my service was satisfactory!!!
so i have plans to ugrade to the 2meg package
but i have no plans to look elsewhere unless 8mb comes about
regards
ian