Broadband Providers Poll [Sept-Dec 06]

mickoneill30

Cool. And 100% of Eircom users are happy.

Mr_Man

I'm am with Regional and I am happy with their service (2mb/1mb).

M.

BendiBus

I've just revisited this thread for the first time in ages and realised I made a voting error

I seem to have voted "Happy with Netsource"!

I'd like to make it clear that I have NTL and I'm happy.

Can a mod change my vote? Being such an influential individual it's important to me that my vote doesn't mislead anyone into making the wrong broadband choice

Mits

Eircom is expensive but the has the best support. I dont like download limits.
Bt offer better packages but the support is bad.
Vodafone 20mb / month package is a rip off, microsoft updates and antivirus update use up your allocations and coverage is poor, keeps disconnecting.
Vodafone unlimited coverage is poor, keeps disconnecting.
Imagine cheap but works and you get a static ip.

At home I'm with Eircom for 3 years and have had very little problem. I'm on the home plus package, I would like no download limits and a static ip. but apart from that it has been good. I used the gaurdian service which slows the connection a lot but does keep the kids safe.

thebman

Have SkyDSL Satellite Broadband. Reasonable solution but want proper broadband in my area. Have not tried Vodafone as it's a bit expensive for my liking.

SkyDSL is affordable and works at least 90% of the time but does not seem to work properly with fast user switching in XP.

Paulj

i have magnet broadband...speeds are really good and the download limit is large at 25gb (+50c per gig thereafter), there's no upload limit. Cost is 30e per month. It's worth noting that they won't provide a password for the equipment they provide (which is free of charge) which means you can't setup virtual servers on the router - that's my only complaint tbh.

mob

i have BT and i'm not happy i've had problems and there customer service is shocking.

thinkin of changing to digiweb metro it looks like a good package

mikedragon32

I'm with Eircom, happy with the service, relatively happy with the speed, not bothered by the limits, I don't really d/l that much.

The support is great. The only problem I've had in the 11 months was apparently caused by me, but they were of great assistance.

Pricey though. I was looking at the Magnet website and did a line check which says I can get 2meg BB. They advertise it for €15pm. Do I keep my eircom line and continue paying line rental to them or do I pay that to Magnet also? Apparently because we have eircom Phonewatch, we have to keep the eircom line. Is this true?

Paulj

The current situation (for me anyway) with magnet is that the exchange in my locality hasn't been upgraded fully yet so i can't avail of the 15e/month package. Instead i pay 30e/month for a different package, and i pay 24e/month to eircom for line rental.

Magnet said that when they upgrade the exchange (in about 5 months) i will then be able to get the 15e/month offer. At that point i can choose to pay the line rental through them also which would mean i'd be paying 15+24=39e/month to magnet and paying 0e/month to eircom.

I dont know about the phonewatch thing.

Foxwood

mikedragon32 wrote:

Apparently because we have eircom Phonewatch, we have to keep the eircom line. Is this true?

Every single copper telephone line in the country belongs to eircom. So if you have a phone line, it's an eircom phone line. under certain circumstances, eircom will "unbundle" that telephone line to a third party that has spent a boatload of money to install their own hardware in your local telephone exchange. Instead of charging you €20 plus VAT for the phone line and the use of a telephone number, eircom charges the other operator €15 plus VAT (per month) for just the bare copper. In most cases, that other operator is going to provide telephone services over that wire, and probably some other services. But the wire still belongs to eircom.

Phonewatch needs to be able to make a phone call in the event that you house is being burgled. While in theory they should be able to make that call over some other operators network on the same copper line, there a lot more that might not work that in that case. So it's quite likely that eircom Phonewatch will say that they'll only support the service if you stay with eircom.

Maybe Smart and Magnet need to bundle an alarm monitoring system into their packages. Alarm monitoring is actually one of the main uses/drivers of LLU in the US.

mikedragon32

Thanks for the info guys.

FWIW, I got an e-mail from Eircom today stating that they're reducing the cost of my BB package by €10.

chickalacka

looks like smart are winning with 100% of users happy. lower number of replies probably because users have no reason to visit this forum. the percentage for eircon is amazing. shows you can fool some of the people all of the time. no wonder smart are in trouble. for €10 per month i have 3Mb/256kb no cap and with smart there is no connection fee. as far as i'm concerned if you're not smart you're stupid.
(edit) should also like to point out that smart have their own hosted forum so advice is knowledgable and fast. also it is smart that eircon is fighting in the courts.

jonski

chickalacka wrote:

looks like smart are winning with 100% of users happy.

I wonder if that is still the case after the news story this morning , maybe they are not complaining because they can't get online .

chickalacka wrote:

as far as i'm concerned if you're not smart you're stupid.

I was tempted to go with smart but they told me I would experience downtime of around 4 to 5 weeks . I am glad now I wasn't tempted .

DonkeyStyle \o/

jonski wrote:

I wonder if that is still the case after the news story this morning , maybe they are not complaining because they can't get online.

(Apparently) Most of us are still online... for now.
Should give me some time to research the alternatives at least.
Not sure what the phone line is doing, probably not working like the rest of the country, but sure I hardly use it as it is.

Bisgrad

DonkeyStyle \o/ wrote:

(Apparently) Most of us are still online... for now.
Should give me some time to research the alternatives at least.
Not sure what the phone line is doing, probably not working like the rest of the country, but sure I hardly use it as it is.

I was meant to be connected to Smart this week...looks like that's not going to happen now!

It looks, from the results of the survey above, that BT or Digiweb are my best options. I'm leaning towards BT at the moment...am I right?

Cheers!

Dellas

Yeah looks like BT will be your best option .

ape_doc

With Smart for over a year now, for less than €40 a month I get 6Mbps (until Christmas, 3 after that) and unlimited downloads. Also was no connection fee or line rental.

Took them a while to get my connection set up, after that its been easy sailing though

Oh_Yeah

It makes me sad how people always are just happy as long as they don't have a dial-up connection, Broad band in this country is a joke, with old technology and antiquated speeds and contention ratios on the ridicoulous side, you pay for 3Mbit/sec and if you are lucky you get 2 for a few minutes, no efforts are made to get the consumer better speeds, Eircom just sit on the monopoly back and shut down any providers who don't play ball and scam money down their pockets without doing anything to increase investment in Fibre optics and other more modern solutions, why is it that we have to be happy with a 2Mbit lines, that can just about sustain web tv on a good day, I know that it's progress that we can get broadband at all in many places, but we are still getting done over big time in comparison to the rest of Europe. Only a few lucky people can get Magnet faster 8 Mbit speeds, but their service is apparently not great either :mad:

And yes I have BT with a crappy contention ratio and yes they are ok as long as you don't need to talk to them or in any ways have problems, BT has without doubt the worst customer service in Ireland! but do they care, no, because there is no real competition and only sheep who are happy with the way things are...:cool:

DonalMcTavish

I have Icecomms or Ice broadband and would like to give them a big fat zero for help and service.

SpoonOg

IrishTLR wrote:

I have Chorus in Naas. 6Mb:512Kb. Works brilliantly for me and I always get full speed. I would say that I am mostly happy in that the product does everything I ask of it. The only problem I have is a totally stupid 40GB cap on the 6Mb connection. The mind boggles.

I too have the 6mb:512 in Naas, but of late (the last 7 or 8 weeks) the service has been growing steadily slower and having more outages (at one point down to 200kb:500kb, which is a bit silly). It seems not to be the contention rate or the signal so I'm assuming its the fact that they only use 2 gateways out of Naas, and as the best option in Naas, not to mention no phoneline required chorus have been signing people up at a tremendous rate,
that leaves the 2 said gateways totally overloaded. the rumour mill has it that a fibrering is being put in (the much used and fabled 3-4 months to launch chessnut) but having bitched to them on a regular basis for weeks, I'm now on a fairly steady 4mb:500kb (still not 6 humph). But I (from experience) know that they are really the only game in town (as far as Naas goes anyway) having had and ditched, Eircom, BT & Clearwire they are Easy to deal with, are providing an excellent (if currently overloaded) service. If they added another gateway out of town, in the intrim (till the fabled fibrering) all would be rosie in the garden. my Gaming pings dropped from 80-100 down to 20-30, my downloads come at anywhere from 300 - 500kps depending on source. The Cap is there to stop bandwidth raping. Oh and I heard the other day that Newbridge will be going live (with Fibre) within weeks (I may become jealous):D

RangeR

SpoonOg wrote:

I too have the 6mb:512 in Naas, but of late (the last 7 or 8 weeks) the service has been growing steadily slower and having more outages (at one point down to 200kb:500kb, which is a bit silly). It seems not to be the contention rate or the signal so I'm assuming its the fact that they only use 2 gateways out of Naas, and as the best option in Naas, not to mention no phoneline required chorus have been signing people up at a tremendous rate,
that leaves the 2 said gateways totally overloaded. the rumour mill has it that a fibrering is being put in (the much used and fabled 3-4 months to launch chessnut) but having bitched to them on a regular basis for weeks, I'm now on a fairly steady 4mb:500kb (still not 6 humph). But I (from experience) know that they are really the only game in town (as far as Naas goes anyway) having had and ditched, Eircom, BT & Clearwire they are Easy to deal with, are providing an excellent (if currently overloaded) service. If they added another gateway out of town, in the intrim (till the fabled fibrering) all would be rosie in the garden. my Gaming pings dropped from 80-100 down to 20-30, my downloads come at anywhere from 300 - 500kps depending on source. The Cap is there to stop bandwidth raping. Oh and I heard the other day that Newbridge will be going live (with Fibre) within weeks (I may become jealous):D

Interesting piece of news there. It will be great if the fiber thing happens. I would tend to agree with you about their service of late. My Chorus connection has been pretty bad over the past few weeks. I have rang Chorus on the issue a number of times without resolution. Rang them just last night as I was getting 250kbps:350kbps with about 10% packet loss. I was not impressed. It has been an on going thing over the past few weeks after about 6pm and weekends.

And this morning, I woke up to NO broadband at all. I checked my Endian firewall, VoIP etc. Nothing. Not a dicky. Rang them at about 10:30 this morning to see what was going on. Promised call back but none came. Rang them again at about 3pm and was told that somebody was looking at it now. Still no call back.

I really do like my Chorus broadband. 6Mbps is just great. But their cap and recent unreliability is pretty bad.

On a good note, every time I ring them [if from my mobile] they know me straight away. I don't have to give them any personal or contact details. They can ream them off to me straight away. Very good step in customer care that I haven't experienced with other providers of any kind.

Actually, Macari's Pizza place on Naas Main Street has a similar system. I can almost ring them up and say "Same order as last time". From my caller id, they have my name, address, and I "assume" my previous order history. Pretty cool.

tonton-bob

Hi

I have a few questions for the UTV users.

-Is the connection suitable for a gamer ? ( ping , contention ratio )

- Do you keep your eircom line
It seems that yes but their website is not very clear.

-Is a modem is provided ?
Same as before , it seems that yes


As far as i can see, UTV seems to be the best provider available ( apart from Smartelecom and Magnet )

jimmy2shoes

i have been really pleased with bt for the last 5 months however over the last couple of weeks the speed i am getting in the douglas area of cork has been shameful. can i get through to them? of course not, do they care? i very much doubt it. What can i do? absolutely nothing.

Liam Byrne

I'm with Smart for the last 6 months - €45 all-in for line rental, BB and local/national calls.

No complaints whatsoever, apart from the fact that the copper line won't support anything more than 2.8Mb, so the recent +3Mb upgrade is out of reach.

I did lose incoming calls for a week or so, but that's no major loss since very few people knew it after eircom forced me to change it to switch; never lost broadband, so the comment re Smart subscribers not being online isn't valid; the reason 88% of Smart respondents to date are happy is the price + service, and it'd probably be higher if it weren't for some apparent hassle reconnecting after recent events.

From the posts, most of eircom's respondents are happy "....except for the price", which means that the survey doesn't give the full picture.

Galen

Still stuck with dial-up, hope to get wireless before the year is out. It would be helpful if you added a few WISP to the poll. Westnet etc.

delos

The technical service I receive from Smart is top notch. I've had no technical issues whatsoever in the 4 months I've been with them - apart from being unable to receive incoming calls for a couple of days. I suppose its a sad reflection on the state of things when I'm praising a company for providing the service that they advertised. All in all I'm delighted with their €35 package.

Customer service (as opposed to the technical support when I needed some information), however, leaves a lot to be desired. I suppose if they have got to make cuts I'd rather it was in customer services rather than technical support.

Here's hoping that they survive!

ilovehoovering

i started off with IBB Ripwave (useless), moved to Clearwire 2mb after a few weeks (useless). that was a year ago and i've just given in and ordered a phone line + 2mb connection from Eircom. fingers crossed i'll have proper broadband soon even if it is expensive.

Psychedelic

just got BT today after a disaster with perlico. waiting ages for this.....and BT's customer and technical support is a joke.

anyway, got the 2Mb broadband, just downloading stuff now, download speeds seem quite slow, only getting 30kbps on each of the 2 things i'm downloading now, should i be getting more or is this normal?

Stonemason

Zapho wrote:

I'm using a crowd called FWI (www.fwi.ie) and cover from Ballina to Killaloe to Clonlara in Co. Clare.

Its a wireless service with 1mb up and down as their standard package and no download limit. I'd recommend them if you're living in those areas.

Im with fwi as well and am having major problems.I think they are over subscribed.They dont let you pp which is fine by me but might upset a few limewire monkeys.I can barely get pages to load tonight never mind play cs or do anything i want to do.Im paying €40 for a 2mb down 1mb up connection and to be honest i feeling cheated.That said they are suposed to be working on upgrading so we will see if that pans out.

PS ZAPHO hows your connection lately ?

de5p0i1er

I'm getting a good deal from BT I did a complete switch for phone and internet and I got a great deal. They really undercut eircom.