Eircom can't do it all on its own (Sunday Times)

simonm2

Eircom = near junk bond rated company - look up Stand and Poor / Moody's some of their debt is rated one point above junk.

What I want from Eircom:

1) I want a human being to answer 1901 or ring me back in a reasonable length of time.

2) I want to be able to talk to someone who has at least the faintest glimmer of a notion about customer service and who can actually solve the problem (Suggest Eircom gets some lessons from the ESB - whatever their other failings they have the service bit right)

3) I want my emails answered in a timely fashion (2 weeks is not timely).

4) I want my phone bills post marked.

5) I want a complaints department which is not "economical with the truth."

6) I want Terms and Conditions which don't need a barrister and team of solicitors to interpret (and which Eircoms own staff can't understand).

7) Despite Eircoms assertion on prices I'd like some European style packages like Tiscali's current French offering of 34 Euros for 2mbit (or 1bmit if the line isn't up to par) broadband with unlimited phones calls throught France (which has 15 times our population and I suppose 6 times the land mass if not more.)

Now don't hold your breath kiddies ......

I think I'd better head off and start looking for Chinese lessons....

Ripwave

simonm2 wrote:

unlimited phones calls throught France (which has 15 times our population and I suppose 6 times the land mass if not more.)

That's a fairly irrelevant argument - a French person isn't going to make any more calls than an Irish person just because France has a larger population than Ireland. (And landmass is pretty much irrelevant too - it doesn't cost significantly more to route a call 200 miles than it does to route it 2 miles. Local versus National rates have more to do with volume, and are really little more than a historical throwback in this day and age).

DonegalMan

LFCFan wrote:

Clearly Undercoverguy is completely void of any knowledge on the subject of Broadband and as such should go away, find out about it, then come back and give his opinions.

I disagree with you.

Undercoverguy either doesn't know or doesn't understand the facts (unless he's a troll, which I haven't ruled out) but he's typical of Joe Soap in the street who also doesn't know the facts. What better place to learn those facts than here?

We have to be able to educate the general public about the issues and Undercoverguy is serving a useful purpose in reminding us of the lack of real knowledge/understanding we have to tackle.

simonm2

Ripwave wrote:

That's a fairly irrelevant argument - a French person isn't going to make any more calls than an Irish person just because France has a larger population than Ireland. (And landmass is pretty much irrelevant too - it doesn't cost significantly more to route a call 200 miles than it does to route it 2 miles. Local versus National rates have more to do with volume, and are really little more than a historical throwback in this day and age).

My view is that the complete EU (as a minimum) should be a single call zone. As you say the local vs long distance thing is essentially Victorian/Edwardian. A call from Dublin to Cork may very well be routed through Singapore for we know or care. With these packages a French person can call someone 800km away any time of the day or night without an additional charge - in Ireland a 800km call means a call to the UK or France.

Similarly if you look at mobiles - it you tootle over to T-mobiles USA site the most expensive package is 130 dollars. All the packages (that I looked at) include unlimited same net to same net calls, unlimited off-peak calls. The 130 dollar package adds 5000 minutes a month peak time calls to any number that is not part of the same network. Thats a lot of talking.

The same operators 3g data offering is the US is a flat 30 dollars a month for the unlimited bandwidth offering and they are not the cheapest. Compare that to Vodafones 50 euro a mont offering here with 3mb a month.

The long and the short of it, is Oirish shafting the Oirish, as a friend of mine puts it. Eircom shaft's us, EsatBt shafts us, O2 and Vodafone do it too (hey beginning to look almost like a lyric) - - lets do it, lets shaft someone too!

Ivan

How can Eircon claim they are part of a competitive market when their competition who "are doing it on the back of Eircom’s investment", are being charged ridiculous prices for use of their "investment" to provide a competing DSL service to customers and yet still 99/100 times beat Eircon's own prices?

Mmm, yes. Logical.

Ripwave

simonm2 wrote:

Similarly if you look at mobiles - it you tootle over to T-mobiles USA site the most expensive package is 130 dollars. All the packages (that I looked at) include unlimited same net to same net calls, unlimited off-peak calls. The 130 dollar package adds 5000 minutes a month peak time calls to any number that is not part of the same network. Thats a lot of talking.!

Apples and oranges - in the US, the person calling a mobile doesn't pay a premium, it's the person who recieves a call on a mobile that pays the premium.

The long and the short of it, is Oirish shafting the Oirish, as a friend of mine puts it. Eircom shaft's us, EsatBt shafts us, O2 and Vodafone do it too (hey beginning to look almost like a lyric) - - lets do it, lets shaft someone too

Eircom isn't an Irish company. ESAT isn't an Irish company. O2 isn't an Irish company. Vodafone isn't an Irish company.

simonm2

Ripwave wrote:

Apples and oranges - in the US, the person calling a mobile doesn't pay a premium, it's the person who recieves a call on a mobile that pays the premium.

I don't understand this.

Ripwave wrote:

Eircom isn't an Irish company. ESAT isn't an Irish company. O2 isn't an Irish company. Vodafone isn't an Irish company.

Agreed - and T-mobile isn't an American company.

Victor

Eircom's budget for capital spend on the network over three years is E84 million.

Out of an income from Line Rental alone of over €400 million per year.

You also need to account for maintenance out of the €400m. Repairing a line downed by weather is not capital.

simonm2 wrote:

I don't understand this.

Phoning a cellular in the States cost the person dialling the same amount of money as if they were phoning that person on a fixed line. The phone companies make their money via roaming charges. Where in Europe roaming charges tend to only apply in other countries (although deal sare available, e.g. UK & Ireland or Irelan + Northern Ireland), in the USA they might apply in the next town.

jd

Victor wrote:

.Phoning a cellular in the States cost the person dialling the same amount of money as if they were phoning that person on a fixed line. The phone companies make their money via roaming charges. Where in Europe roaming charges tend to only apply in other countries (although deal sare available, e.g. UK & Ireland or Irelan + Northern Ireland), in the USA they might apply in the next town.

In the USA if you have a cellphone and someone calls you-you may have to pay a call charge.

Victor

jd wrote:

you may have to pay a call charge.

Yes. Somewhere between "may" and "will likely have to"

Urban Weigl

jd wrote:

In the USA if you have a cellphone and someone calls you-you may have to pay a call charge.

It depends on your phone plan, what company you are with, or how many minutes are included. For example, in the US it is normal to have often 1000's of minutes included "free" with your subscription, which count for both incoming and outgoing calls. Some plans also offer unlimited minutes, unlimited minutes on certain days or unlimited minutes for incoming calls.

In addition to that, you can get "all you can eat" 3G plans, with no cap, for as little as $25 monthly.

SkepticOne

DonegalMan wrote:

David McRedmond in Sunday Times Article
The Sunday Times - Business
October 03, 2004

This, in my view, is where the government could direct funds, in partnership with Eircom, to complete the job of rolling out the service to everybody in Ireland.

That is what is happening in Northern Ireland (between the government and the incumbent telephone company) and it can happen here.

Government can also help by designating Eircom as an essential service, so that every new housing estate or business park has access built in (which Eircom will invest in) for telecoms infrastructure.

Eircom are taking advantage of the current higher profile of the broadband issue to make their big push.

This seems to be the core of Eircom's current public message - that Eircom should be the ones to get public funding and that this is the only way to get broadband out to everyone. A similar message was put out on 5-7 live a couple of weeks ago.

Does anyone agree with this?

The main point to be made here is that Eircom already make money out of the internet regardless of whether or not they provide broadband. It has been argued that they even make more money from dial-up and ISDN than DSL. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, they do collect significant revenue from dial-up internet and this revenue is lost when people switch to DSL. Consequently, any deal by Government with them needs to compensate them for this loss of revenue otherwise Eircom won't sign up.

Secondly, if the Government goes down this road it will need to read the fine print very carefully. Eircom will probably try to convince the Government that upgrading the exchanges will be enough only pointing out later that their copper infrastructure isn't geared up to providing DSL to a lot of subscribers.

By this point it will be a major political issue and Eircom will be well placed to extract more money to replace a lot of decayed lines and add proper lines in place of split lines and even then many will be out of range given Eircom's line testing criteria. Yet more money will need to be paid in order to provide individual solutions for those not qualifying for whatever reason.

Finally, when Eircom have extracted hundreds of millions or even over a billion of tax payers money, they will have achieved the nirvana of telcos: total monopoly over broadband. No further threat will exist from rivals and Eircom can proceed to raise prices like they did with line rental. And the beauty of this from Eircom's point of view is that it has all been done at others' expense. Most companies need to raise a lot of capital before they can do this.

What annoys me about Eircom's propaganda is the way they make out broadband to be a huge burden that Eircom alone are taking on. Eircom have never upgraded an exchange out of some feeling of social responsibility. There has had to be a business case for each and every one. It would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. Therefore they do not deserve a pat on the back for the exchanges they have upgraded to date, yet they seem to expect one. Most of the 'burden' is simply the fact that Eircom make money from exchanges without upgrading and there is little if any extra profit to be got from upgrading since the new services cannibalise revenues from the old.

If the State goes down the route of funding broadband development around the country, it should be on the basis competive tendering on a case by case basis and it should be done at a pace where other companies, not just Eircom, can participate. Not only will money be saved, but Eircom won't get to extend its monopoly at the tax payers' expense. Afterall, it is this monopoly that has been the problem all along.