Broadband Horror Stories - We want them

damien

I'm looking for everyones horror stories about getting Broadband or not getting it. I'm looking for as much detail as possible from anyone that's had a bad experience getting broadband.

Things like delays(12 weeks to get it), various faults and obstacles, who you had to communicate with before it got resolved. Many of you have posted your experiences here already and I'd appreciate it if you linked me to those posts.

I may also need your name and email address for proof that we are not making these stories up. If you want to send us on copies of email communications ad letters etc, please do so.

What IOFFL wants to do is to compile a report of the horror stories and distribute this report to the various Telcos, the press, Comreg and the Government.

jwt

Last year a client of mine who makes his living on the internet moved business premises from Dublin city centre to new offices quarter of a mile away.
He rang Eircom and explained that he wanted to leave the old ADSL line live while the new one was switched on , reasoning that leaving his old line on would allow him to leave a server in the old premises to collect mail etc while the new one was enabled.

Client moves in and surprisingly Eircom enable the new broadband line straight away. I move all his comms gear to the new premises get it all running smoothly and he’s a happy camper. He rings Eircom to kill his old line and they immediately i.e. there and then, kill his new line. He rings back, explains what happened and is told that Eircom is very sorry about that, but he is in a queue to enable lines and will have to wait his turn. Again he explains that this is due to an Eircom error, and once more is told that there is nothing that can be done. But he is promised that it will be rectified quickly. :rolleyes:

Next week he still has no line and rings again to be told that the engineer who was going to enable his line (again) had looked at the job sheet, recognised the number and assumed that it was a clerical error as he had already enabled the line, the first time and promptly closed the call. :mad:

Once more to the back of the list. This time he threatened to contact the press. Lo and behold the line is enabled within the hour.
When asked about damages this mess caused to their customer both direct revenue, clients emails not being responded to etc he was told that Eircom make no warranty regarding the suitability of the line for business purposes. The line and the ADSL was never at fault, Eircom incompetence was at fault but as is their way, they ignored their customer.

John

gothakane

You may have already noticed my recent horror story

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=179773

I see no point in typing it all out again, however feel free to edit it at your discression before distributing to the press.

Sooner NTL start ripping Dublin's roads to shreds the better

Illkillya

Same here, I don't want to type out my whole thing again, but basically, had to wait 3 months for a line test to find out whether or not I'm even elgible for DSL. Just today, that has been resolved. I haven't got DSL yet but at last I will be able to order it today. http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1832864&posted=1

damien

Illkillya wrote:

Same here, I don't want to type out my whole thing again, but basically, had to wait 3 months for a line test to find out whether or not I'm even elgible for DSL. Just today, that has been resolved. I haven't got DSL yet but at last I will be able to order it today.

Can you link me to where you posted this before ?

Illkillya

Noticed I had forgot to link and edited my post, but not before you spotted the omission. The URL is http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1832864 and it also links to an earlier thread dealing with it.

Scruff

not typing it again but the thread is here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=172158

continued venting my agner and frustration here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=1830392#post1830392
where you find other in a similar and worse boat

still dont have broadband.
:mad:

query

Just to be practical - the original post did state that names and email addresses should be given, so simply linking to threads is unlikely to be helpful. Also somebody will have to go through all the threads and this is time consuming!

Tellox

..where to begin.
September 2002: Ring for a line test to be done on my number
December 2002: After asking esat and eircom 4 different times and not receiving a reply, I rang esat about 3 times a day until they did one. It passed, and now I can order dsl.

I would really really like to say that that was the worst of it..
April 2003: No DSL from esat despite me calling them once a week after the 6weeks period passed. I file a complaint with COMREG, And ring esat and ask what the hell is going on.

June 2003: I get DSL. Over the course of the past few months, I had to mail off the same info 3 different times, until someone could finally confirm that they got it all. After another 6 weeks,no-one arrived. When I rang esat, none of my info was on file, and they didnt have me down as a customer to get DSL. I sent an email to Una Mcgirr(sp) , and an engineer arrived in 3 days.

May 2004: I ring up and ask why I havent been upgraded to 512k along with the rest of the 256k customers. Im told 10 or so people have been left on it,and he'll upgrade me straight away.

Its been 5 phone calls and about 10 emails to esat now (I was at one point told "everything will be sorted over the weekend), and I'm still on 256k. I've stopped bothering.

damien

Great work guys, keep it up. Some of the threads that were linked above are superb. When I have a few hours I'll go through them all and message those that were fcked around by the providers.

If you can say what exchange you are on and your geographic location, then it will be even better.

Also if you have friends that don't use boards but are in the same boat tell them about this thread. Make them post. Even though you guys have experienced it first hand I'm sure you wouldn't like others to suffer as you have so the more people we get to tell the real story of the Broadband mess the better chance we can stop this from happening again.

Damien.

shinzon

Hmm thats strange since the switch over my threads on my horror story ongoing i might add is no longer on here

Dont suppose anyone can dig it up or is the old board not archived, if not be prepared for long thread tomorrow lol

Shin

Moriarty

All the old threads are there, the search function just isn't searching through them yet.

Illkillya

query wrote:

Just to be practical - the original post did state that names and email addresses should be given, so simply linking to threads is unlikely to be helpful. Also somebody will have to go through all the threads and this is time consuming!

It wouldn't be as time consuming as typing the whole lot out again. But if you think my 3 month wait for a line test is worth clicking on a link for, then my email address is jamesgalvin@esatclear.ie and my name is James Galvin.

Scruff

omg! dont tell anyone your real name!!!! "They" may be watching!! :eek: :eek: :eek:

eth0_

Tellox wrote:

Its been 5 phone calls and about 10 emails to esat now (I was at one point told "everything will be sorted over the weekend), and I'm still on 256k. I've stopped bothering.

STILL on 256k???? :eek:
Have you mailed Bill Murphy? He usually sorts things out quickly. If you've no joy...why don't you just stop paying them? After all, you're paying the same as the people on 512k for half the service!

neilm247

It is funny my story incoporates a few of the past gripes. I live in the 'tarf where of course my line was one of the two which could not receive broadband in the entire area. *yarg*
This was the scenario for a while (6 months). I rang and got line tests and fools on the other end of the phone. The result of shouting down the phone to try to get them to understand the situation was to pay €150.....
Then funnily and luckily enough, my phone went dead for a week. (BTW this was a phone line installed by eircom a year earlier). What happened??? After spending nearly €150 for the phone calls to report it to a telephone rep., an Eircom engineer was dispatched to the house and said the line was not working at that time (duh!?) it had in fact ripped or had torn or something so that the phone didn't work, and the reason we managed to make calls for an hour during that fiasco was that water conducted the calls from the two ends of the wires filling the apparent gap in my connection!? After a bit of wire tweaking my phone was restored.
Finally to broadband - Being quick to realise that it would cost €150 to get the same engineer to my house again to look at the broadband problem, i asked him to fix my broadband there and then. He told me to call again later on in the week. I called again. The B@stard took a week of himming and hawing saying he would take another week to fix the problem. Then 3 days into the week of waiting, i did a line test and what happened????? IT WORKED!!!!!!!!
I don't know why it took 6 months to get something like that done. Now that I have a working phone line i can finally not avail of that cr@ppy eircom broadband and give my money to someone who gives a $hit about their customers.

daymobrew

Riverwood, Dublin 15

Basic DSL issue:
House built 1999. Connected to Blanchardstown Centre exchange via cabinet 57. This has 'S' cable which is unsuitable for DSL unless you are very close to exchange. db loss on line is too high (about 63db).
Houses across the road, same address just built about a year earlier, are connected via cabinet 64 which has 'M' cable which is perfect for DSL.

Full story:
When DSL rolled out to Blanchardstown exchange I asked for line check. "Failed" but given no reason. I fought to get a reason e.g. if it was internal to my house I could work on fixing it. I rang ComReg and complained (very helpful I must say) and some guy at eircom left me a voice mail the next day. This guy didn't respond to my return voicemails until I found my way to his boss.
I was told that there was no way to find out why line failed, something like 'there is a tester box that gives results but no other info'. I said that there must be someone who maintains this 'box' but apparently not. I bit my tongue and decided that this person was never going to divulge anything so I had to hang up.

I contacted a friend who used to work in eircom and he tested our line and told us the db loss. We got the phone number of a neighbour across the road and found that they could get DSL. My friend suggested we order a new phone line and hope it works. We did but it didn't. Again we were very lucky that our friend was able to test the new line when the eircom engineer came to the house, and before he actually connected the new line to our house. When the engineer heard about those across the road passing, he was able to find out from a coworker in the exchange that we were on different cabinets, and they had different cable. Again, we were very lucky to have an inside guy.
The engineer said that there could be underground cable running between our side of the road and the opposite but that we'd have to know someone high up in eircom to get someone to even look into this.

A family friend met Dermot Ahern and submitted a summary of our 'story' to him in April. We submitted cabinet details shortly after. First response from the Minister's office was unhelpful, simply directing us to other broadband providers in our area (some which weren't actually available). We wrote again, using simpler language, and are awaiting a reply.

Another family friend knows someone senior enough in eircom but he (in eircom) doesn't appear to be doing anything at all.

I recently wrote to Mr Nolan explaining the cabinet/cable issues. No response yet.

ntl are rolling out broadband (released today, Aug 18) but I found out that it is not available in Riverwood - the thrunk cable is unsuitable and would have to be replaced. No chance of this happening in the near future according to someone in ntl.

Irish Broadband took months to respond to a site survey request. We are not interested in dealing with a company with service that is that slow. Also, the ping times with IBB are very slow, so prohibitive for ssh/telnet work where there is as much info going up as down.

We have considered asking a neighbour to get DSL and we would set up a wireless LAN across the road but this is too much to ask someone you don't know really, really well (and have a key to the house to reboot the hub and DSL modem as necessary).

Damien
PS Sent me a PM to get full address and email.

damien

More stories on Dublin.ie

http://www.dublin.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=158

shinzon

April/may 2003

Enquired about getting broadband, rep on the line saud yes my line was suitable, decided i had to wait to get my wages into the bank before ordering, went to the live broadband help 9 days later spoke to 2 reps to confirm a few things before ordering it, 1st rep answered my questions and said line was passed all ok, second rep I talked to about ordering the broadband and this is where it went downhill rapidly checked the line again and said it failed, first person out of 3 reps to say it failed

Throughout 2003/ Start 2004

I will list in no particular order what I did next as regards getting BB

1) ESATBT offered to setup business broadband on my line to test to see if it worked, but I had to sign the 12 month contract agreement first before theyd do so, I had to decline basically because of the costs involved which were astronomical at the time, ESAT were the only company to say they would test broadband by actually setting up a product.

2) I contacted Phil Nolan, Philomena Lonergan and another person whose name escapes me in eircom to try and get this sorted, after 6 months of arguments phone calls and e-mails they suddenly found a fault on my line, October 2003 an engineer came out to the house to basically fix the line, and I told him several times that this was so i could get Broadband, he spent 2 days working on my line and at the street cabinet where my line was connected 2, he finally said the line was fixed, I called Philomena Lonergan who had the line tested again and it still failed, so she asked me to go around to all sockets in my house unscrew the front plates and disconnect the wiring from the back of these and just leave the Eircom socket connected, I duly did this and it still failed, at this stage she washed her hands of the affair and told me the line was to noisy because of the internal wiring arrangement in my house, which conveniently got Eircom off the hook cause they dont deal with internal wiring.

3) I contacted COMREG on no fewer than 11 different occasions only to be told that there was nothing they could do, as per usual as useless as a fart in a wind tunnel

4) I contacted the government, i got a lot of letters saying that theyd look into this for me and fair dues a lot of them actually bought it up with dermot aherne, who wrote a personal letter saying that in his constituency he had heard similar horror stories including the fact he himself couldnt get broadband at his own home (which i presume he has now), the most useful letters i got was from Tommy Broughan, he kept in contact with me to see what progress had been made and made some personal enquiries as to my status.

5) last thing i did before giving up altogether was on the advice of several boardsters i contacted the Waterford area supervisor by phone, and this intrigued me the most, I rang him and explained my story to him and he said hed make some enquiries and ring me back, he rang back and talked to my mother and these were his exact words "I cant get involved in this", like it was some big conspiracy.

So thats basically it, I was tired of banging my head against a brick wall so gave up, im looking into wireless solutions now as it seems the only option other than paying for a new line to be installed, which has at best a 50:50 chance of passing, im sure ive left out a load of stuff as regards what id done, pity the search function on boards isnt working yet cause i could drag up my old threads on the subject which details in painstaking detail the whole debacle

But the main points are listed above, hope this helps

Shin

^pt^

Not sure if mine would be much use, but http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=113496

dahamsta

shinzon wrote:

dermot aherne, who wrote a personal letter saying that in his constituency he had heard similar horror stories including the fact he himself couldnt get broadband at his own home

Anyone got a copy of this letter?

adam

Moriarty

Eircom upgraded the exchange ahern was on a few weeks after he began saying that. Who says politicans don't know how to get things done in this country

shinzon

dahamsta wrote:

Anyone got a copy of this letter?

adam

wished i had of saved all the government letters and dermos in particular but im afraid i didnt, i threw them out when i gave up on bb on my line

sorry bout that

shin

The Clown Man

Moriarty wrote:

Eircom upgraded the exchange ahern was on a few weeks after he began saying that. Who says politicans don't know how to get things done in this country

I'm on his exchange so I'm certainly not complaining!

Go dermo!

shinzon

just to add to this as i was going down to the shop this morning and an eircom van was parked accross the road, so i said to myself will i or wont i, so i said what the hell.

Went over got chatting to him, told him about my BB woes, he was a nice chap and he said hed test the line there and then, got out his laptop and did the test and showed me the results

He explained that 11 tests were done on your line and every single test came up perfect, he said the 11 tests was actually an overview of 99 tests done, he said that my line was about as perfect as you could get lol

Yet my line still fails for BB, hows that for a pisser

Shin

De Rebel

dahamsta wrote:

Anyone got a copy of this letter?

adam

Reference to it .........
http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9540137
and also
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1202101&issue_id=11031 - free registration required, the text is....

"Eircom 'embarrassed' into providing broadband"

MINISTER for Communications Dermot Ahern (left) has revealed how he "embarrassed" Eircom into providing his whole village with broadband, writes Senan Molony.

The Minister said he was unhappy that Eircom was failing to upgrade telephone exchanges to allow customers to received broadband, when they were receiving the money anyway through dial-up connections.

"I mentioned it so often in speeches that I was the Minister for Communications and yet I couldn't get broadband at home, that they eventually called me up," he told the Irish Independent.

"They said they were going to carry out the necessary work at my local exchange."

Mr Ahern lives in Blackrock, Co Louth.

He now enjoys broadband connection, whereas many parts of the country remain unable to sign up.

He is quite careful of course to let it be known that he didn't actually ask for it !!!!

eth0_

shinzon wrote:

just to add to this as i was going down to the shop this morning and an eircom van was parked accross the road, so i said to myself will i or wont i, so i said what the hell.

Went over got chatting to him, told him about my BB woes, he was a nice chap and he said hed test the line there and then, got out his laptop and did the test and showed me the results

He explained that 11 tests were done on your line and every single test came up perfect, he said the 11 tests was actually an overview of 99 tests done, he said that my line was about as perfect as you could get lol

Yet my line still fails for BB, hows that for a pisser

Shin

Same thing happened me. Did you call eircom and give them his name and inform them that your line is PERFECT? I did, got nowhere of course. MORONS.

shinzon

yep i did etho got on the phone after i was finished with the engineer, still failed after i explained what the engineer had done, and i said even with what the engineer said your still telling me it failed

God what she said next nearly had me telling her where to stick her BB

" Our Records are More upto date then the engineers"

A polite way of telling me to **** off and dont call again if ever i heard one

Shin

eth0_

What? How could she say that? Must have no brain whatsoever....argh.

dub45

shinzon wrote:

yep i did etho got on the phone after i was finished with the engineer, still failed after i explained what the engineer had done, and i said even with what the engineer said your still telling me it failed

God what she said next nearly had me telling her where to stick her BB

" Our Records are More upto date then the engineers"

A polite way of telling me to **** off and dont call again if ever i heard one

Shin

Shin,

Why not get methodical on this. (And in fairness to the guy who helped you out it may not be the best of ideas to actually include his name thats if you do know it)

Email Phil Nolan CEO Eircom giving the details you gave in your first post here. He seems to act on such emails. Point out that you will be submitting your case for inclusion in 'broadband horror stories' that is being accumulated for publication but also state that you will be forwarding full details of your case to Comreg.

Copy the details to Comreg and point out to them that you will be including any action or non action on thier part in helping you in 'broadband horror stories'. Be nice:) but assertive!

damien

His email is phil.nolan@eircom.ie

I have to say the Eircom engineers are really great people. It is a pity that not all of Eircoms staff are like that.