Problems with the incumbent telecoms provider?

jbwan

The state of telecoms service provisioning in this country is a complete joke! My story is a long one but one that I have come to learn, affects many people in this country.

On January 18th I completed and posted a relocation form for BT Ireland when I was moving house. I required that both my telephone line and broadband line be moved to the new address. This would be a very straight forward procedure as the new address previously had a phone line and also a BT Ireland broadband line just before we moved in.

Sadly, 10 weeks on and I have still not had any satisfaction from BT Ireland. The worst case prediction from the company was originally 20 days. After this period had lapsed I started correspondence with the company to try to ascertain what the problem was. After ridiculous periods of holding in call queues and being bumped around between customer care agents the recurring excuse was that Eircom were supposedly failing the line on what is known as a soft-tone test.

Basically if a soft-tone test fails then it is deemed that the line is not physically connected at the switch or terminated at the house end. This however is certainly not the case nor has it ever been during my period of waiting. Each and every day that I come home from work I lift my receiver to check for a dial tone and there is one. I dial 1901 to ensure that I can call the Eircom help line and there is no problem. I also can call emergency services but obviously have not tried this (merely validated through not receiving a barring tone when I dial 99 without dialing the last 9).

I have challenged this with BT Ireland asking for an engineer to be sent to my address to verify the soft-tone and escalate the problem with Eircom. An engineer has never been sent. In total I have had two "acknowledgement of complaint" e-mails from BT Ireland and only one phone call saying that the matter was being investigated. I have been contacting BT Ireland every week, trying to get information but without success. Once I managed to get a reference number from BT Ireland that supposedly linked to a line query that was lodged with Eircom. When I called Eircom to verify this, they simply and abruptly told me that they would not speak to me as I was a BT Ireland
customer. I disputed this saying that Eircom were still in charge of the physical lines and that BT merely handover my money to Eircom as a proxy payment provider - I received no satisfaction from this line of approach.

Last week I became so annoyed with waiting that I called Eircom to switch my services back to them. All seemed fine until I told the agent that I was in the middle of a relocation. I was then informed that my universal account number would probably have changed and I would have to wait until the relocation finished before being able to transfer back to Eircom. This leaves me proverbially between a rock and a hard place. My relocation is going nowhere with BT Ireland, Eircom will not speak to me nor can they take me back as a customer; I am stuck without services until such time that things magically resolve themselves.

To quantify the absurdity of the situation here are a few details relating to the case:

1) After my wife and I got married we moved into a new home and we
transferred our phone number from house A to house B within the same
exchange
2) My mother-in-law then moved into house A and had a new phone number
connected by Eircom and a BT Ireland broadband connection without any
problems
3) Now we have moved back into house A and the Eircom number and BT
Ireland broadband line that my mother-in-law had were cancelled in January
4) A soft-tone has always been present on the line in house A and at no time was this ever physically disconnected

From these details it is clear to see that there can be no issue transferring the phone number as it has been done before. There is no question about a physical line being present, house A has had 2 different phone numbers in 3 years and was only recently cancelled at an account level and not a physical disconnection. House A also has a BT Ireland broadband line up until January which means that the line is obviously broadband compatible. There is no excuse as to why this matter has not yet been resolved. The necessary task can be performed remotely as a simple reactivation of an "in-situ" line but for some reason it would appear that Eircom are refusing to do so.

What makes this case worse is that if Eircom have reported a "not in-situ" line to BT Ireland then why aren't BT Ireland requesting that a new line be installed on my behalf? This obviously is not required but it would lead to an interesting audit trail should an engineer be sent to my home to connect a line only to be met by me stating that it was already present and always had been.

It would appear that the working relationship between the incumbent telecoms operator of this country and those trying to introduce competition is very soured, to the extent that I am waiting 10 weeks for a job that literally takes about 20 minutes to perform. In addition incorrect statements are supposedly being issued by Eircom regarding the state of my physical line. I have even complained this matter to ComReg but they have simply ignored my correspondence!

It is urgently required that these issues are highlighted and must be brought to the fore of our government's attention, especially the Department of Communications. It cannot be allowed to go on any longer. I have suffered incredibly, both personally and professionally because of this nonsense and I do not believe that anyone else should ever have to suffer the same again. There is a push on-going in the country at the moment to roll out broadband and politicians are worried about the penetration statistics. I have all the necessary physical requirements to get broadband but it is the operators who are stopping me by their perceived lack of ability to work together! I sincerely hope that somebody out there will bring these matters into the relevant fora for resolution.

dub45

You should try emaling phil.nolan@eircom.ie (Eircom CEO) it has been known to get results.

swoofer

You have my sympathies. This is the type of story that matt cooper and today fm should be putting to those people that appear on his show about BB.I would right to the chairman of BT in the UK and cc it to all and sundry.

This is 2006.

gb--

jbwan

Thanks for the responses guys. It's nice to get responses when you've been failing to do so from everyone else. It's suffice to say that I am not holding my breath at the moment but neither am I jumping up and down with joy. I'll just have to ride out the storm...

Sponge Bob

did you dial 199000 at the soft dialtone ....or did anyone tell you about that ?

jbwan

Nobody told me about that number. What does it do?

Blaster99

Why not remove BT from the equation? They're not doing anything seemingly, so just cancel whatever it is that they think they're doing, then tell eircom to install or enable the line. Once that's done, you can then get broadband from whoever. I wouldn't think involving a low-rent reseller that's geared to just resell a particular product in a process that mainly involves eircom is a good idea.

swoofer

@BLASTER, thats what I did here in Clare but I then went to BTESAT and to be fair no probs apart from the billing fiascos. I am sure they owe me money.#

gb--

Sponge Bob

jbwan wrote:

Nobody told me about that number. What does it do?

It talks back a number on a line such as the previous number on the line which may be flagged as a line pass on the database.

jbwan

@spongebob, thanks for that piece of wisdom, I'll try it out when I get home.

Sponge Bob

Basically when you move you should

1. dial 199000 in new gaff, make a note of the number
2. confirm you pass or fail in a line checker.
3. contact BB provider and ensure that they accept that you pass and raise an order against that line .

email Phil as you were told and ask him what the procedure is , I would be fascinated at the detailed answer

bealtine

Sponge Bob wrote:

email Phil as you were told and ask him what the procedure is , I would be fascinated at the detailed answer

mail to phil gets filed in the rubbish usually, these days.