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D'Peoples Voice wrote: »

If ComReg allow Three get away with this, it would surely be bad news for rural customers on Lyca/Tesco/CarPhoneWarehouse and Virgin Mobile.

http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/ComReg1616s.pdf

Well here is what Three are actually requesting:

http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/ComReg1616.pdf

And reading it, it actually makes an awful lot of sense and for the most part wouldn't effect rural customers or MVNO's *

* It is worth noting that non of the MVNO's have objected to this or made any comment to Comreg, just Vodafone who has no interest in this other then making things harder for Three.

Basically both Three and o2 had licenses for spectrum in the 2100Mhz band. So now that they have merged, they have loads of extra bandwidth in this band. Unfortunately however the frequencies of the two are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Vodafones and Meteors frequencies in between. This is very inefficient and means Three would have to run two separate radios at each tower location. They are requesting to make a very minor technical adjustment so that they can use just one radio to operate both frequencies. Makes total sense.

Now yes, they say that at some sites, where demand is low, they will operate only one of the 2100Mhz bands, thus saving them money. But at busier towers they will continue to use both licenses for extra capacity.

In terms of rural broadband, this has to be looked at in the bigger picture that Three has been rolling out 3G in 2100Mhz to lots more rural towers then had it before and also are rolling out 3G on 900Mhz and also 4G on 800Mhz and 1800Mhz.

As a result rural Ireland has more capacity and coverage then ever before. Also keep in mind that the lower frequencies 800Mhz 4G and 900Mhz 3G are much better suited to rural areas due to lower frequencies being able to travel much further and penetrate walls and trees much better. The higher frequencies of 1800 and 2100 don't travel very far or penetrate walls very well and are thus more suited to being used to deliver extra capacity on conjested urban towers, where towers are much closer together and thus the signal doesn't need to travel very far.

Basically Vodafone are just being dicks.

Allyall wrote: »

Waited over 20 minutes, got through, she told me to type a code into my phone, I did, then she hung up.

I am now at square one.

I think I just had a lucky escape.

My OH's and my own port worked perfectly fine. My sister did have some problems, the online port failed and she had to call to get it sorted, took a few minutes to get through to them, but once she did, they sorted it out and had her ported with 5 minutes.

Otherwise the service has been perfect so far.

In case Lyca are reading this, my advice to them is that they do need to improve their porting process. When you initiate a port online, you should get a text about the port and another text once complete or similar if it fails, with a message to contact support. At the moment porting online lacks transparency and proper notifications.