Broadband stories wanted urgently!

jmulligan

Hello all,

My name is John Mulligan, a business journalist with The Sunday Tribune. I'm writing a piece for Sunday (15/2) on broadband, looking at prices, issues, etc, and was hoping to get some tales from people who have or are experiencing trouble with their broadband connection, or alternatively, those who have good stories to tell. Anyone willing to go on the record would be very much appreciated. I see from posts on another broadband site that some people are waiting longer than expected for connections etc. Also, I see in here about IOL disconnecting some people who exceed the download cap. It'd be great to talk to someone who has had those kind (or any kind) of problems. Anyway, I'm working to a very tight deadline on this (to be finished tomorrow evening - Tuesday) and would be grateful to anyone who wants to talk! You can email be at the address here or get me at the Tribune at 6314300.

Thanks in advance,

John

Serbian

Hey John,

Personally I have had no trouble with my current provider, IOL Broadband. However, I did have a tough time with my previous provider, Irish Broadband. I think Wireless Broadband is understood to a far lesser degree by the average person, as there aren't many ads on TV or the radio for any of the wireless providers, so I don't know how relevant my bad experiences would really be to your article.

I suppose a slight irony would be the fact that wireless broadband is the way forward, and really needs to be promoted as an alternative to the last mile, which is currently monopolised by Eircom.

Anyway, I have complained enough about it on these boards, if you want to hear more you can PM me.

Serb

Reyman

Hi John,

I'm not sure any of us will be able to afford to read your piece on Broadband with this new 2.00 Euro price for the Sunday Tribune ---- now

---

"The dearest paper in the British Isles" ?

Anyway if I were you, I'd have a look at the ridiculous test standard being set by Eircom to qualify for DSL. It's generally accepted to be way over the top and dicussed at length on this forum over the last few months.

Have a look at the threads!

jmulligan

Thanks for the hint. I'll take a look at the threads. E2!! It's a bargain! But, really, I know..... maybe we should go tabloid, em, I mean compact, like the Indo....

machalla

It might be worth taking a look in the Activism - Ireland Offline forum too.

Plenty of well informed people over there too.

I can think of one thing straight off thats quite a scandal which is the lenght of time it takes to transfer to another BB provider. Up to 6 weeks or more to transfer over. This apparently only takes seconds in reality (flick of a switch almost) but due to Eircon restrictions and paper work they have managed to stretch out the changeover process to a ridiculous length of time to stop people switching providers easily.

I looked to switch from my current provider Netsource to UTV back in about November and was told that when the contract with Netsource ran out it at the begining of December last year it would be sometime in the new year (maybe) before I could be reconnected with UTV. In the end I just stayed with Netsource as I needed the BB connection with no disruption of service.

I'm sure there will be many more stories to tell if you have a browse around.

yellum

John,
I sent you a private message. I have a good story to tell about getting connected. After waiting since the end of October I got connected on Jan 15th.

BigEejit

By far the biggest problem that most people have is parting with so much hard earned money for a very basic service ... with caps of 4GB, 8GB and 16GB caps per month for the money the ISP's are charging it a complete scandal .....
This high cost is a direct result €ircons greediness, it is a national scandal that they are left increase the line rental to be almost double the European average .... our communications regulator is the most spineless government body I have ever heard of, and our Minister for Communications is always barking up the wrong tree or pandering to the private company that is €ircon ....

My Netsource subscription (which I got because it was supposed to have no cap, but within two months they were capping people out of hand with no prior warning and no indication what level of downloading brought on this cap) costs €66.55, add on €25ish euro for the phone bill and its €90ish for SIXTEEN SHAGGING GIGABYTES ... thats the most expensive broadband of anywhere I have heard of ... approaching €6 to download a gigabyte of data .....

[offtopic]Yellum, thats some ****ed up sig you've got[/offtopic]

po0k

Broadband in Ireland is being held back by the lack of affordable uncapped services and the monopoly of Eircom over the exchanges and the as-of-yet unpublicised scandal involving the purchase of aluminium wires (cheap, not fit for DSL as intended) when the government gave Telecom Eireann money for copper wires.
Someone made a very tidy sum of money with that one, akin to cowboy house builders charging the owner for the best materials and installing C-grade stuff instead.
I am a student living in rented accomodation in Galway City, along with 4 others, and we all chip in for the DSL connection as we all find it a great benefit to be able to work from home in the evenings as opposed to staying in the college late into the evening. We are all highly computer literate and as such require a fast and stable service without having a meagre bandwidth allowance held to us like a gun to our heads. We signed up with Netsource back in June, when they had marketed the SOHO product as an uncapped solution at a price-point which we found acceptable, €66 per month inc VAT and supposed domain name registration (~€12 per month inc VAT, or €144 a year, when normal .com/.net/.org registration is about €10 per year). We still have not had our domain name (a .ie) register for us by Netsource.
We accepted this was a way for them to increase their product margin due to their service being "unlimited" w.r.t. download amount per month.
Everything was fine for June/mid-July, we reveled in the experience of pages loading faster, and of finally being able to use the net as was intended without fear of getting a bill for multiple hundreds of euro coming through our letter box in a months' time. There were periods of low speed due to Netsource needing to aquire more bandwidth for the service to cope with the higher-than-expected uptake.
We saw this as teething problems and didn't mind the occasional few days of poor speed, as we felt as though we were all part of an expedition, forging ahead of the pack showing how it can be done.
How misplaced our optimistic enthusiasm was.
In August we had a speed rate cap applied to our line (as did most of the customers) dropping it first to 22KByte/sec (less than half the advertised speed) and then to 6KB/sec, which between 4 people made it unusable.
They relinquished when we rang them up and asked how much they would allow us to use the product we were paying so dearly for. When pressed for a figure the Netsource representative stated 30Gigs download a month.
We all stuck rigidly to this for the next mont, only to be told that they had changed the Terms&Conditions to 16GigaBytes inclusive of Download and Upload per month, where other simialr packages from UTV, EsatIOL and even Eircom were 8Gigbytes down, no upload cap and for only €45 a month.
I (the account is in my name and paid from my student current account) have never signed a copy of the new T&Cs agreeing to them and have never agreed with the 16Gigabyte "accepable usage" limit, though we have tried to stay within it while we search for alternatives. It is like trying to enjoy driving a sports car along a tightrope.
We have installed a web cache proxy to reduce external bandwidth wastage when browsing websites (images/files only need be downloaded once and then are available for all users on our LAN) and have gone out of our way to install bandwidth monitoring tools to keep an eye on our usage.
I was 1 step away from switching from Netsource SOHO* to EsatBT Business (a far superior package, freeing us from paying Eircom's extortionist line rental charges) before Christmas but found that I couldn't due to my exchange being the one out of three in Galway City which Esat had no presence in. The reason for their inability to install the gear has largely been blamed on Eircom stuffing it with all the lines coming from an area of Galway which is quite a distance away and which has been rapidly built up over the past years. That, ontop of Eircom leaving old kit lying in the racks taking up valuable space purposely so that Esat could not get access and install their own kit, which is a move that was mandated by the EU several years ago, yet has not been fully enforced by our elected government.

At the bottom line there is no package in Ireland to compare with what is available to our brethern in mainland Europe, and this is largely to do with the inaction and ignorance of Etain Doyle, and the lack of power she was given by our government to serve the interests of the people, over the past few years.
Eircom as a company should have been stripped of the local loop before being sold off and the local loop should have remained the property of the people who paid so dearly for it.
Charles Haughey was a saint compared to the travesty which has gone unnoticed in this country with relation to the telecoms infrastructure over the past 2 decades.

(A very pissed off)John Coleman,
3rd Electronic Engineering student,
Galway.

Not so much problems with broadband but problems getting it.
Iol don't seem to want my business.
Their sales is a joke.
I get a different story from their sales droids each time I ring up.

Check it out:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=139038

ednwireland

love to give you a tory but can't get it the eircom engineers say it would go on the line but it fails the test so can't have it. waiting for a reply from dermot ahern on why eircom aren't forced to make all lines capable of taking dsl connection.

po0k

The usual answer is that they don't have the equipment in the exchanges and/or that the customer is too far away from the exchange.
One reason, which I've already mentioned, is that they have been using aluminium wires instead of the copper they were given money to buy.
On top of that you ahve the widespread usage of DACs boxes, often called Pairgain or split lines, which essentially squeeze two or more phone accounts onto a single ISDN channel or it's equivalent to save eircom money which has "disappeared". The end result for the customer is a noisy line which gives at mest 31200bps modem connections speeds and which is incapable of support DSL no matter how far from the exchange you happen to be.

Mine is a good news story.

I have eircom i-stream starter since last may.

I live in the country surrounded by fields and the next nearest house is about a quarter mile away.

I'm located about 2.5 miles from the Eircom exchange in Arklow co wicklow .
I love my broadband, with it's fast down loads-a megabyte in an average of 20 seconds and web pages that are viewed as fast as you click on them:)
The old dial up modem days seem like a distant memory.

I don't download a huge amount of movies or tv shows due to Eircoms download cap of 4 gigabytes discussed in other replies.

oisin

Like others have mentioned here my problem is not BB but a complete lack of it. I got ISDN about three years ago to get some kind of reasonable upload/download speed, which of course costs me double (2 lines). I couldn't wait for DSL to arrive, now that it has, my line fails the line test. Eircom's attitude is "your line fails, you can't have it and theres nothing you can do about it". When I asked why I'm paying the highest line rental in Europe (on the double for 2 lines) for a crappy line, I'm told "we only guarentee our lines for voice not data". When i said this is 2004 not 1904 she hung up on me.

I'm outside the range of all the satellite providers and NTL haven't upgraded my area so as far as BB is concerned I might as well live in the middle of the Gobi desert as 7 miles from the centre of Dublin.

eth0_

Might be worth mentioning that just over the border I can get uncapped 512kb dsl (with 256k upload, down south its all 128k upload for home services) for £24...thats less than 40 euro. For about £4 more I can have 1mb. In the south 1mb from Esat costs 110 euro and about 190 euro from eircom a month. Yes, their 1mb services are contended at 20:1 as opposed to 40:1 for the 1mb service I could have in my home here, but still.
Big difference.

eth0_

Originally posted by oisin

I'm outside the range of all the satellite providers

How is that possible? You can get broadband satellite access on a boat in the atlantic ocean you can sure get it in Dublin :P
There are many satellite bband providers that cover Ireland..

po0k

John, something else you may wish to mention is the very high inital entry capital required to start in the Irish broadband market, which is set by ComReg at afaik ~€1mil, making it quite hard for some of the local "small-fry" start-ups to provide a bit of competition in the market.

Commuinity wireless (Wi-Fi, 802.11*) might also be worth a mention.

daveyjoe

Originally posted by eth0_
How is that possible? You can get broadband satellite access on a boat in the atlantic ocean you can sure get it in Dublin :P
There are many satellite bband providers that cover Ireland..

I presume he meant wireless Broadband (802.11x)

Mutant_Fruit

take a look at my IBB rant thread, personallyt i dont want to go on the record, but there's other people there who might want to.

eth0_

Originally posted by daveyjoe
I presume he meant wireless Broadband (802.11x)

Perhaps!

yellum

Originally posted by eth0_
How is that possible? You can get broadband satellite access on a boat in the atlantic ocean you can sure get it in Dublin :P
There are many satellite bband providers that cover Ireland..

Yes you can get sat access in a boat but you have to have a lot of cash. If you want almost affordable sat broadband theres only a few suppliers and depending on where you are the footprint might not reach you.

Its fine for getting stuff down but uploading via the 2 way sat system is very troublesome if you are at the edge of a footprint.

eth0_

Originally posted by yellum
If you want almost affordable sat broadband theres only a few suppliers and depending on where you are the footprint might not reach you.

But surely everywhere in Dublin is covered by at least one satellite broadband service? I wasn't taking into account cost really

jmulligan

Just a note to say thanks to everyone for posting. I'll try to have a look at some of the threads you all mentioned, but won;t have time to be too in-depth as I'm under a lot of time pressure with this. So, please forgive me for any minor inaccuracies and errors in the piece on Sunday! I'll have time again in later issues to go back and look at some of this stuff. Also, our email is down at the mo, so can't look at any PMs sent! Hopefully that will be rectified soon!

Again,

thanks

John

ando

right John, just a short one:

I had Netsource: it was incredably bad at times. slow
Moved to eircom (took 5 weeks)
Very happy with eircom broadband except the download cap

po0k

Originally posted by jmulligan
Also, our email is down at the mo, so can't look at any PMs sent

After logging into Boards.ie go to the UserCP (Control Panel).
There's a link at the top of the page (one of the grey buttons).
People might have sent you a PM (Private Message) to your Boards.ie account.
This isnot the same as email and is totally contained within Boards.ie itself.
Check it anyways, you may have gotten some storied sent directly to you

jmulligan

Yep, got the PMs too. My mistake. Thanks for the help!

thegills

Very Quickly.
Loads of companies on Dooradoyle exchange, Limerick paying through the teeth for ISDN. eircom promised to upgrade exchange to DSL, all was hunky-dorey. eircom upgraded exchange, but......they had moved all of said companies to a new exchange, Crossagalla which surprise, surprise has no DSL!!

I heard this second hand but I challenge eircom to refute these facts.