Eircoms Next Special Offer Yellowpack BB 20 Hours a Month

Sponge Bob

Yellowpack DSL is a 20 Hour a month product for €20 a month incl VAT.

Story

http://www.rte.ie/business/2005/0616/eircom.html

The CAP is TIME BASED so

"[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]customers will be charged four cent a minute for additional usage."

Thats €2.40 an hour or €57.60 a DAY for every day you bust your cap and you are GUARANTEED to bust your Cap in a day, even if all your PC does is check for that email from Mary in Australia every 30 minutes .

EDIT. Fortunately it transpired after the PR announcement linked above that wiser heads in Eircom had spotted the potential disaster and that the price has an upper cap of €50 a month but nobody told the PR bunnies .

The risk to other users in a given 48:1 contention group is that if someone leaves it on overnight twice in a month they may as well [/font][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]completely [/font][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]tear the arse out of it the rest of the month as there is no Data Cap thereafter so it could be really sloooooooow in the last 10 days of every month


[/font]

Mr E

Thats bloody crazy.... Its not April 1st, is it?

[Edit] They're targetting low-use dialup customers with that, not linux-distro, torrent-loving users....... I suppose its not bad for the people who log on once a night for a half hour to check email.....

Creamy Goodness

even my dad would use the twenty hours no problem and he only checks mails.

the major selling point behind broadband (except it's speed) is that it's always on and doesn't tangle up the phone line.

eircom have brought dsl to a extremely new low.

Scruff

€ircom are some bunch of tossers. Desperatley bastardising broadband so they can rape the irish public like they used to with dial up.
I'd say the majority of people who sign up for that wont have a clue that bb is always on and that they will HAVE to turn off their modems after use.
What a shower or ****.

Sponge Bob

There is no peak/offpeak either , as long as the modem is on you pay . 20 hours a month is 45mins a day not half an hour .

They'll catch you if you type that reply email slowly

Urban Weigl

This new product could cause a slipped disc by making you bend over to unplug your "broadband connection" every time you finish checking yer mail.

bealtine

Urban Weigl wrote:

This new product could cause a slipped disc by making you bend over to unplug your "broadband connection" every time you finish checking yer mail.

aye bend over while reaching for the vaseline...

SnotNosedGit

I think its a con.
They are preying on naivity there.
If they are going to do this and someone gets a bill for over €1000 then i'm sure that person would have a case again Eircon

Creamy Goodness

doubt it as long as they spell out the terms and conditions the customer won't have a legal leg to stand on

bk

This is ridiculous, Eircom really don't want to introduce a BB product for less then €40 per month. Eircom are trying to do this to spur their flagging BB uptake figures, as most people don't want to pay €40 per month. However most people don't want time based services either.

Most people want an entry level, always on BB product for €20 - €25 per month, like NTL 1m service or many DSL services in the UK.

Eircom get a clue, NTL, Smart, IBB and Clearwire are going to cut you to shreds if you don't get your act together.

damien

Press release on the way. They were not meant to announce this til July!

Mr_Man

does anyone know anywhere else in the world where a BB connection has been metered in this way? Or is this an Irish solution to an Eircom problem?


M.

SkepticOne

It is an indication that Eircom still operate in monopolistic terms. In order to extract maximum revenue from different segments of the market they arbitrarily cripple services.

I don't think there's any justification for limiting DSL in this way. They still need a dedicated port on the DSLAM and they still need to send out a modem. The costs to Eircom are likely to be much the same. It may even cost more to monitor usage but from the point of view of a monopolist seeking to maximise revenue it makes sense: extract as much as possible from each segment of the market and cripple the service in various ways so that you need to pay more to get the full potential.

It is similar to Microsoft's old practice of limiting network connections to ten in desktop versions of their operating systems. There is no technical need for it, they just want to protect revenue of their 'server' products so they cripple the lower priced versions in some way in order to make the more expensive ones more attractive.

Another practice I heard about in this regard was the cooker manufacturer, Belling, in the 50's manufacturing several versions of the a particular small cooker but installing a device on the cheaper versions that prevented more than one cooking ring from being operated at one time. Again, no technical reason for this. The purpose was simply to make the lower priced version worse so they could charge more for the non-crippled version thereby extracting maximum revenue from each segment of the market.

Crap like this disappears when competition enters. The fact that Eircom are introducing this indicates that Eircom are still the only real player in town. If ComReg allows this, it will mean that the pretence of cost-orientation is finally being done away with.

Praetorian

A virus, trojan or spyware could be responible for a huge bill. This has to be the most stupid product Eircom has ever announced.

seamus

This is a blatant money spinner, and if anything, it's an attempt to drag technology down, kicking and screaming.

Eircom know two things:
1. A lot of people with computers use their computers a lot more than 45 minutes per day, and not necessarily on the net.
2. With this mindset, people will think that as long as they're not surfing the net, they're not paying. After all, most broadband connections are connected while the machine starts up, it doesn't require user intervention.

Clearly if anyone is gullible enough to be sucked into this, they'll spend maybe two hours a day on the computer, net connected (but not surfing), and after a month, they'll have racked up a whopping €96 - money that will drop into eircom's coffers despite them not actually having done anything.

And with two-monthly billing, Agnes will owe eircom €192 before she realises anything is wrong.

Tony, you and your cohorts are scum, you should be locked up.

seamus

Cremo wrote:

doubt it as long as they spell out the terms and conditions the customer won't have a legal leg to stand on

I disagree. Any contract that this product would be based on would be wholly unreasonable. Unless eircom provided a full, frank and comprehensive explanation of how the service works, to each customer.

gombín

All,

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Regards.

seamus

gomb&#237 wrote: »

All,

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Regards.

Shocker. That's the last thing I expected. Still, you could get a proper service for half that €50 figure from some of the other providers.

Praetorian

Thanks for the response gombín.

Urban Weigl

The timeout won't help much when you have Windows automatically checking for updates, Outlook seeing if there's new mail, and so on. But at least there is a cap on the price, though as has just been said, €50 a month is more than you'd pay for otherwise (don't forget line rental, which brings the total to €75, a good bit dearer than Smart).

SkepticOne

bk wrote:

Most people want an entry level, always on BB product for €20 - €25 per month, like NTL 1m service or many DSL services in the UK.

Eircom get a clue, NTL, Smart, IBB and Clearwire are going to cut you to shreds if you don't get your act together.

I think Eircom are being quite clever here.

At this point in time NTL, Smart, IBB, Clearwire are still only in certain areas. Eircom are very slowly entering into a phase where they are getting significant competition in a certain areas and no competition (still the majority) in others.

However their DSL offerings need to be standardised across all areas. The time-limited service can serve the twin purpose of competiting against NTL, Smart et al. on price (if not quality) in areas where they operate while extracting maximum revenue in those areas (most of Ireland) where Eircom have the monopoly.

Sponge Bob

gomb&#237 wrote: »

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Thats means about 50% of users will end up paying €49.99 each month I'd say . Thanks for the clarification though Gombín, €49.99 is a bit steep but hardly a mugging .

If we take it that 50% of users will pay €20 a month and 50% pay €50 a month then the average is about €35 which is a netch below the €40 rate for the Bit Limited not Time Limited equivalent.

Over on Eircom Wholesale the product is called " Kronos " ....(being a play by some marketing droid on the Irish for pulling a tree out of (crann as .... céard ...... like) ???? innit ??? ) .

I make it a 6 month min contract same as the current entry level to which is is technically identical . I cannot see the rebilling rate for the per minute component

heggie

so if its the modem that monitors your time usage, whats to stop any of us signing up for this, then changing the modem? get bb for 20 per month

Sponge Bob

It monitors locally but it does not bill you or affect the billing process Heggie , DSL synch time or DHCP cumulative lease time with single lease = 29 mins per session is the only way to monitor a time based product that I can think of .

8track

I registered with Smart in March, expecting availabilty by the end of this month (as per their web site). Smart have now informed me by email in reply to my request for an update that my exchange (Letterkenny) is now delayed, but that they "anticipate" that it will be live by the end of the summer. However, they can't be sure of that and can't specify what they deem the end of the summer to be.

This could go on for months more, so I'm now thinking about going with Eircom home starter for six months, then move to Smart if available by then. Anyone see a downside to this (apart from shelling out more to Eircom)?

daymobrew

Cremo wrote:

doubt it as long as they spell out the terms and conditions the customer won't have a legal leg to stand on

seamus wrote:

I disagree. Any contract that this product would be based on would be wholly unreasonable.

I think I agree with Cremo. The eircom flat rate dial-up product has a nasty termination clause where you get charged per-minute rates between cancellation date back to date of previous bill. As this is in the T&C customers get screwed. I was charged per this clause but got a refund because they ignored my instructions to cancel after the billing date.
BTW, anyone know of a product or service where they (retro) charge a different rate when you tell them you've leaving? IMO that's what this clause means.
Office of Dir of Consumer Affairs say the clause is fair :rolleyes:

SkepticOne

Most of the issues being raised regarding billing issues also apply to dial-up and ISDN. If you leave your computer connected on these you also run up a huge bill.

Eircom aren't introducing any new problems here as far as I can see. True, one of the huge advantages of broadband is the always on capability (I would write this into the definition if I could) and the fact that no matter how long you stay on you get charged the same. This can also be done with dial-up and ISDN but is harder as resource use in these products is directly related to time spent per user, unlike DSL, but there is no reason why Eircom can't introduce arbitrary cripplement into DSL in order to limit its use in some way.

What will be interesting will be the wholesale version of this. Are Eircom going to monitor connections and disconnections on behalf of the reseller? How much more money would it cost to keep the user online a couple of more hours? I imagine for the purpose of costing, Eircom will assume the user is downloading continuously the entire time and charge accordingly. In reality the marginal cost of keeping a user on for an extra hour should be next to nothing. Apart from bandwidth, the only extra resource is IP addresses.

damien

They are going to be on the Last Word on TodayFM now.

Listen in and ring and comment

Comment Line 1850 715100
Text Line Meteor 085 4100102

dahamsta

Another cracker of a press release. The use of the word "fines" is a stroke of genius.

adam

Lobby group IrelandOffline today harshly criticised the new pay per minute broadband offering from eircom. Chairman of the group Damien Mulley stated "One of the major benefits of broadband is its always-on properties. eircom have effectively switched the clock back for Internet users who will now have to return to the dark days of timing their Internet activity for fear of incurring ridiculous penalties. Broadband is not meant to penalise users for being connected to the internet."
The Internet access trend over the past few years was first to move from dialup to flatrate dialup and then to always-on broadband. The new eircom offering now means consumers are back to a pay per minute charge.

IrelandOffline stated that this product will do nothing but increase peoples fear using broadband instead of encouraging them. This product will confuse anyone who is unsure of what to expect from broadband, having the effect of further decreasing the take-up rate in this country

"To charge €20 for 20 hours and then include a €2.40 an hour penalty for staying online and enjoying the benefits of broadband is scandalous. Eircom are introducing entirely artificial pricing mechanisms with this product.

Unlike a phone call, it costs eircom nothing for a broadband connection to be permanently connected. This is little more than a cynical ploy by eircom to price gouge consumers new to broadband who know no better." stated Committee member Aidan Whyte

"A 'light-user' broadband product should be based on data downloaded not time spent online, such as in the UK where BT's 'Broadband Basic' product is just as fast as BT's mainstream consumer broadband but has a 1Gb a month usage limit." he added.

"For 24/7 usage on an existing dsl product it will cost €40 a month. With the new eircom per minute product it will cost €20 to start with and with fines totaled in it will go up to €50. Additionally a user needs to then pay for the highest line rental in EU of just under €25. All these various pricing structures will needlessly confuse the consumer who simply wants broadband for a flat price but instead they are offered a pay per minute product for perpetuating eircom's revenue stream." commented Mulley

jack_christie

McR*^%$£"! is on the Last Word on Today FM in minutes

JC

SkepticOne

I partly blame DCMNR for this sort of thing. Their directive to ComReg to get the numbers up (regardless of quality, price or availability) means that ComReg are under pressure to approve this sort of rubbish.

mike65

Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Broadband that turns off after 10 mins of "dead air"! wtf? If this is the line of thinking why not just offer 512k for 20 euro and be done with it!

Matt Cooper is fairly alert to McRedmonds tosh. He's mentioning the huge phone response and I bet McRedmond knows some of the callers are reading this thread!

Mike.

jack_christie

A slightly better performance from Matt Cooper, but still weak on the subject. Nearly always seems to have yer man on his own. As ever everyone is left with the impression that only eircom supply broadband.

"1mb/s the full monty", for f........

JC

SkepticOne

mike65 wrote:

Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Broadband that turns off after 10 mins of "dead air"! wtf? If this is the line of thinking why not just offer 512k for 20 euro and be done with it!

Because 512k would be too good at that price. It would still need to be crippled in some way. Perhaps some means of delivering small electric shocks to the user every 5 minutes could be developed. Some way would need to be found to make the product less desirable.

Never give the punter more than is absolutely necessary. If they want more or don't like this or that aspect of the thing then charge them more.

mike65

Okay 256k then!

Mike.

cgarvey

Matt did seem to be more informed this time alright... sound clip is here (~740KB) for those who missed it.

SkepticOne

mike65 wrote:

Okay 256k then!

Mike.

How about 256k and the electric shocks every 10 minutes as opposed to 5?

SkepticOne

Note the way McRedmond dealt with the issue of time not being relevant to the cost to Eircom in providing broadband and could it not be done on the amount downloaded:

"We certainly looked at that and we considered that. Would downloads be easier, but I think we decided that for most people it is easier to understand the concept of time than to understand the concept of material downloaded."

He sucessfully evaded the issue raised which was the cost to Eircom (not the ability to understand time for the user). However it is the cost to Eircom which is supposed to be the deciding factor in ComReg approving a wholesale product. The wholesale product is supposed to be cost-oriented and should not have artificial features added in which are not desired by the user.

Capt'n Midnight

Charge should be capped at entry level BB cost.

Does the user have to click something to reactivate the modem or is it automatic ?
Many home PC will have power saving so will it dial up when the PC comes back to life ?

Antivirus updates, DNS queries, Adobe acrobat reader, SETI at home
the list of apps that try to connect to the internet is endless.

Also as I've posted before the fastest known time for Windows XPSP1 to be zombied is 30 seconds. After about half an hour it's almost certain and you no longer control all the internet connections from your machine.

byte

A 512k connection with a low cap would have made more sense I reckon. Call it BB Lite or something...

I shall download that TodayFM clip later and have a listen.

Sponge Bob

He coulda offered 256k for €20 a month flat and provided it out to 10km as well.

SkepticOne

byte wrote:

A 512k connection with a low cap would have made more sense I reckon. Call it BB Lite or something...

Too many people might go for this instead of paying more for the 1 meg product, imo.

It would make sense in areas where broadband is coming under some competition, though, like Waterford. In most of the country Eircom is the only provider so they need to cripple the lower end products further.

Chalk

wtf,
5m 20s into clip mcredmond says that
"in the future we may consider introducing a [data] volume based product"

does he not even what they offer already is data limited??????

Chalk

gomb&#237 wrote: »

All,

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Regards.

are you sure its not a usb dsl modem like what bt:uk used to offer there customers?
in that sense its limited not by the modem, but by windows dial-up settings?

Mr_Man

to note that McRedmond said in the course of the interview that this was the cheapest time base BB product in Europe, and that the average for a time based product was €34 pm.

Now is he spinning porkies here or are there other companies providing time based BB packages? I certainly haven't come across any.

It was noticeable how he seemed to be rattled by the point on data vs time as the limiting factor.

It would seem that Eircom are trying to use this as a taster product to try and encourage people to try out broadband, but would seem to have made a hash of it. I haven't seen any mentioned of the cap on this product yet, but not doubt there is a very restrictive one as those poor confused souls who can't understand the concept of data downloaded wouldn't need to download much.

If this is the limit of what Dr Phil had in mind when he told the shareholders that there would be new initiatives in July to drive BB uptake I'm glad I'm not a shareholder.



M.

Sponge Bob

There is NO CAP on it. I make it that if you are on the entry level 8Gb (now with €3 per Gb Charge applied to every BILL after 7th July if you bust your cap) you are better off as a n existing on the €20 product if you bust your cap by 3.3Gb a month (total d/l 11.3Gb a month average) . There is no point going to the €54 product, also 8gB a month from 7th of July .

Thats because the €20 product is capped at €50 a month tops . It takes about 2.5 hours to download 1 gB of data which is where mc redmond got a figure of 8gb = 20 hours .

This segmentation is insane , truly insane ???


Press Release



Lastest Press Releases
eircom to introduce ‘Time Based’ broadband at €19.99 per month for 20 hours usage

▪ Targets next wave of broadband users

▪ New Always-on Broadband promotional price of €29.99

Wholesale price reductions of up to 37%
16th June, 2005. eircom today announced that it will introduce the first ‘time based’ broadband product to the Irish market called eircom Broadband Time. Offering 20 hours of broadband access per month, eircom Broadband Time will be available at a special promotional price of €19.99 per month (inc. VAT) for new broadband customers who sign up between July and September. After the 20 hour allowance, customers will be charged 4c per minute for additional usage. eircom Broadband Time is aimed at attracting lower usage dial up customers to the broadband market. eircom is also introducing wholesale price reductions for other operators to support these new products, i.e. a wholesale price of €12.55 for up to 20 hours usage for the Time Based product, and promotional subsidies of €115 per customer, payable to other operators.

For just one euro per hour, eircom Broadband Time allows Irish Internet users to enjoy broadband at speeds of 1Mb, one of the fastest connection rates for entry level broadband in Europe. eircom Broadband Time is also 20 times faster than dial up Internet products.

eircom is also introducing a new promotional price for its ‘always on’ eircom standard broadband product of €29.99 per month. This promotional price applies to first time customers that sign up between July 2005 and September 2005.

Commenting on the announcement, eircom’s Commercial Director, David McRedmond, said:

"Our research indicates that there is a demand for a more flexible entry level Broadband product. eircom’s Broadband Time product will attract lighter internet users who have yet to experience Broadband. eircom’s wholesale price reductions and promotional subsidies for other operators will further increase competition and growth in the Broadband market.

seamus

Now the key is for someone else to start an ad campaign with the slogan "we don't believe in time limits" and offer a 512 or even 256 package at €20/month.

eircomtribunal

daymobrew wrote:

I think I agree with Cremo. The eircom flat rate dial-up product has a nasty termination clause where you get charged per-minute rates between cancellation date back to date of previous bill. As this is in the T&C customers get screwed. I was charged per this clause but got a refund because they ignored my instructions to cancel after the billing date.
BTW, anyone know of a product or service where they (retro) charge a different rate when you tell them you've leaving? IMO that's what this clause means.
Office of Dir of Consumer Affairs say the clause is fair :rolleyes:

After requesting action by the ODCA (Office for the Defence of Consumer Abuse?) about this matter – which is absolutely clearly in breach of specific T and C legislation _ I got this feed back from the ODCA in the beginning of April:"In relation to Clause 9.3 of eircom net's dial -up internet terms and conditions...we have, in the interests of consumers , requested eircom to remove Clause 9.3. We are still in discussion with eircom on this issue."

I would assume those discussions could not take that length of time – so far Eircom have not removed the clause.

This clause 9.3, which retrospectively charges customers who do not happen to cancel their contract at the "correct" date at sums of up to € 300 is the equivalent of a T&C in a pub, where the customer who does not drink up his last pint, gets back the money for the pint, but the barman is instead allowed to take up to € 300 out of the customer's purse.

P.

damien

seamus wrote:

Now the key is for someone else to start an ad campaign with the slogan "we don't believe in time limits" and offer a 512 or even 256 package at €20/month.

They could only offer 256k if eircom had a wholesale product like this. Or unless the rest of them requested ComReg to tell eircom to do it, or if Dempsey mandated an always-on flatrate entry level broadband product that retailed for €15 a month.

damien

seamus wrote:

Now the key is for someone else to start an ad campaign with the slogan "we don't believe in time limits"

Competing ISP - Take your time, we're not on the clock.

jwt

Competing ISP.......eh what's that when its at home. Let me know when you find one.






John goes off to hold his breath


John