Smart going belly up?

machalla

Offtopic but ironic.

http://www.recruitireland.com

Check the featured employers section to the right..

Click on the "More employers" bit if you don't see what I mean...

slumped

Now now now, Eircom are a quality telecommunications company with many good qualities. It is unfair to criticise them for what has happended. Smart brought it on themselves.

Poor marketing and crap PR campaigns cost too much and now they cant pay their bills.

I sympathise a little with Smart customers, but get over it and change now !!

S

art

slumped wrote:

Now now now, Eircom are a quality telecommunications company with many good qualities. It is unfair to criticise them for what has happended. Smart brought it on themselves.

Poor marketing and crap PR campaigns cost too much and now they cant pay their bills.

I sympathise a little with Smart customers, but get over it and change now !!

S

Yes, you too could pay more for a slower line and high contention while smug bastards get away with blocking free enterprise. I would not switch to Eircom if no other provider existed, they are pure mercenaries that have been allowed free reign by a pathetically impotent coms regulator.

Shadoo

slumped wrote:

Now now now, Eircom are a quality telecommunications company with many good qualities. It is unfair to criticise them for what has happended. Smart brought it on themselves.

LOL...

"There are no American tanks in Iraq." :rolleyes:

slumped wrote:

I sympathise a little with Smart customers, but get over it and change now !!

Let me think about... Umm, no thanks mr. Eircom?

Blackdragon

slumped wrote:

Now now now, Eircom are a quality telecommunications company with many good qualities. It is unfair to criticise them for what has happended. Smart brought it on themselves.

Poor marketing and crap PR campaigns cost too much and now they cant pay their bills.

I sympathise a little with Smart customers, but get over it and change now !!

S

I agree with the fact that smart could have handled there money a lot better than what they have done.

I have to disagree with your advice for smart customers to simply get over it and switch. The problem being that untill smart come right out and say it themselfs most of us are still on contract and should smart raise the funds required to pay there bills any contracted customers could be charged cancellation forfeit fees.

As has been posted many times over i believe we should all wait and see what happens when the dust settles. No harm in waiting.

RangeR

Just my little contribution on this debacle. I will be ripping out my phone line by the end of October. I have cable 6Mb broadband and use Blueface. Works perfectly. No need for me to use a phone line.

It's the only way I can see not to give them as much money as possible.
I really hope Smart Telecom survive but it looks very unlikely at this stage. We owe them a lot for shaking up the telecoms sector over the past couple of years.

paulm17781

IrishTLR wrote:

Just my little contribution on this debacle. I will be ripping out my phone line by the end of October. I have cable 6Mb broadband and use Blueface. Works perfectly. No need for me to use a phone line.

It's the only way I can see not to give them as much money as possible.
I really hope Smart Telecom survive but it looks very unlikely at this stage. We owe them a lot for shaking up the telecoms sector over the past couple of years.

I'm in the same situation as you. It feels great not to give Eircon a cent.

Blackdragon

paulm17781 wrote:

I'm in the same situation as you. It feels great not to give Eircon a cent.

And nobody should give those money sucking vamps a cent.

Anyone but eircom.

Gonna stick it out with smart for now and see what happens.

Does anyone know whats going on with the calls at the moment. Are they free or are smart gonna charge me sooner or later?

inode

was just on the phone there to eircom on a unrelated business thing, they told me its going to take longer for them to sort out what i wanted them to do as so many smart customers are ringing them to join up...

shayser

Eircom echoing what ENN said earlier.

Last night, it appeared that a consortium led by Mr Murtagh had agreed to refinance the company, thereby drawing it back from the brink of liquidation.

http://home.eircom.net/content/irelandcom/breaking/9025213?view=Eircomnet

Gadgetman496

This is a post from the Smart boards.

---

Ok, my mate that works in CityWest just took a spin over to the Smart office there. The sign has been taken off the wall, the name off the door and there are no signs of life in the office.

Surely this is a bad sign?

netman

tba wrote:

despite the fact that this is not really my fault, why the sweet holy hell am I the one paying for it, what kind of system allows eircom to shut off another companys service without warning.

Erm I don't think you're reading it right, apparently eircom gave Smart plenty of warning, and they've been deferring the termination repeatedly on a weekly basis... since september 8th it says.

tba wrote:

If eircom had sent me a letter saying,
Dear teebs,

Smart telecom are broke, fair warned be ye says I, we are pulling the plug on their services in the next month, here is a handy form that you can use to switch over to us, if not bugger off and recycle this paper. I might have considered going over to them.

BUT NO! they had to be jerks,

frickin jerks....

//looks into satelite bb

I doubt they're allowed to do that, in fact I'm pretty sure ComReg would slap them for approaching Smart customers like that.

Besides, eircom gave Smart plenty of notice, and that's their customer... You on the other hand are Smart's customer and they didn't bother telling you that they're broke and that their lines will be cut off in a matter of weeks.

When I moved house I was really disappointed that I couldn't get Smart broadband, as it was just becoming available in the area I was moving out of... now I think I was lucky

iblis

gadgetman496 wrote:

This is a post from the Smart boards.

---

Ok, my mate that works in CityWest just took a spin over to the Smart office there. The sign has been taken off the wall, the name off the door and there are no signs of life in the office.

Surely this is a bad sign?

I posted that, but a techie got back with:

colm wrote:

i see lots of signs of life in here! ... maybe he was lookin at the wrong building, we have occupied a few in citywest.

I'm not sure what to believe anymore.

MOH

iblis wrote:

I'm not sure what to believe anymore.

Don't believe anything that starts with 'my mate'. As in:

"My mate just drove past Citywest and they're knocking down the Smart Telecom building"

or

"My mate was on a plane with Osama bin Laden, chief executive of Smart, who told him his plan to undermine the global telecommunications industry by investing loads of his own money in a company he was then giong to fold"

or

"My mate says ComReg are an efficient regulatory body who have levelled the playing field in the Irish telecoms market, and prevented Eircom abusing their monopoly."

Fallschirmjager

what scares me is the simplification of this issue to bill paying. of course we are all in the modern world here and yes smart should have paid but before anyone else revels in the discomfort of roughly 50,000 of your fellow citizens, i would ask you to consider this..

1. smart broke an agreement with telecom, telling us to break our smart agreements is not the best legal advice i have ever heard. we need (as i have said before) to hear from smart as to the recommendations. until then we are in a legal no mans land (IMHO)

2. everyone has to cowtow to the great eircom. Surely this is a classic example of oirish competition. this smells of the same BS as the ESB prices rises and the Gas price rises. the reason this has happened is you ultimately in ireland, have competition of 1. i am sure the last person who thought that was a good idea was josef stalin or maybe kim jong (no dong) in North Korea, however it appears we can add comreg and dempsey to that list of communist stalwarts. dempsey and comreg as the 4th pillar of communism lives on it appears.

3. comreg's idea of working for us (all of us) is a one page pdf on their piss poor web site. one page...thats the result of their 'efforts' on all our behalf (smart customer or others). why comreg just dont move their domain to eircom.BS and at least have the dignity to admit what they are...useless,pointless hacks. they regulate nothing. they do as they are told by eircom.

4. eircom shuts off phone lines starting friday (knowing full well that smart dont have customer support at weekends) and therefore they can contiue their merry way. amazing how they can hobble 50,000+ customer in a weekend but yet it takes weeks to transfer initially. stunning they can do this with such accuracy and such speed when required. i wonder will this raise any eyebrows at comreg? dont hold your breath.

5. eircom decide also that some 999 calls wont work. Wow how sympathetic that is. lets not mention the health and safety issues with this. I wonder will that raise any eyebrows? Where is comreg in this debacle...oh yes another one pager on their website. thats it, for a country where vast tracts are broadbandless to find out that information, courtesy of our comreg friends complete lack of vision, unless of course you use dialup, which wont work cos your smart phone line is down. perhaps dempsey wants us to share dialup lines with our neighbours as a last final ditch attempt to keep us in the 1960's, dancing at the crossroads.

6. suppose eircom decide leitrum or donegal or exchanges in x,y or z are not profitable and just switch them off. will you use the arguement that they didnt pay enough then? well we have done exactly that with BB rollout and our regulator sees this as acceptable, so to be honest it would not suprise me in the least.

7. eircom have a responsibility. due to their own restrictive practices on lines they have to accept this responsibility. they control the network. with no warning, they tank 50,000 or so customers. i wonder did they even tell dempsey or comreg before it started? hows that for a minister or a regulator. and if they knew, why wasnt the meetings begun before the cutoff? why wasnt the regulator informed BEFORE the cutoff? why didnt the regulator warn smart? why didnt the regulator warn us? and on and on the questions go....the only answer you can deliver..is -- eircom just dont care. they are unconcerned with ministers or comreg or anyone. that, for all of us, smart customers or otherwise is a very very dangerous place to be.

8. why isnt smart being obligated by comreg to inform its customers what is going on? where is the regulation? we are now informed that comreg put into place its plan, what plan? the one page pdf? wow, this has all the hallmarks of the 5 year old tablets we all received in case sellafield blew up. comreg has again failed miserably...when is enough, enough?

9. we have a minister more concerned with his leader's 8 grand they the 50,000 people who pay their wages. as usual, the regulator is used as a way of displacing blame. a toothless paper tiger is dispatched to discuss with eircom.i would argue why have a minister at all, why bother with the farce of comreg, if they cannot do anything. what now is his and their purpose?

so finally, as i near then end of my rant...there is the famous poem about extremist behaviour...yes a tad dramatic, i agree, OTT, absolutely, and comparing this to the holocaust is just not acceptable, but the message is clear

first they came for the jews,
i was not a jew so i said nothing,
then the came for the communists,
i was not a communist, so i said nothing,
then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out

so to all those people on perlico, talktalk, etc...whats to stop eircom saying they didnt pay their bills on time...and crank the culling machine up to full speed. who is to say how much eircom is owed by smart. we have their word it is 4 million. why hasnt smart been forced to admit where they stand on this issue by comreg? i cannot make a honest decision in a vacumn...that is exactly where comreg has left 50,000 people.

so please, spare the gloating, and the crude simplistic arguement. no one who is a smart customer thinks they should have ignored their bill, but as you can see...the situation is a little more complex then a one line ramboesque response 'they didnt pay' or 'get over it'.

finally, we need to make a clear example of the dangers here. it will be simplified to 'didnt pay' to cover the dirty tracks that left us in a situation like this. if you àccept the 'didnt pay' arguement...remember, who will speak out for you?

official end of rant...

iblis

gadgetman496 wrote:

This is a post from the Smart boards.

---

Ok, my mate that works in CityWest just took a spin over to the Smart office there. The sign has been taken off the wall, the name off the door and there are no signs of life in the office.

Surely this is a bad sign?

Turns out he did go to the wrong address

Moriarty

Can we please keep all the unsubstantiated rumours off this thread. That includes anything that starts with "my mate.." or "a guy i know in smart..".

tba

If smart are staying in the BB business then I will stick with them, although I wonder will I still have to pay line rental given that the phone line will most likely move back to eircom. I don't wnat a phone LINE! I want a cheap reliable DSL cable connection.

Mountjoy Mugger

Fallschirmjager wrote:

official end of rant...

And a fine rant it was too. Well said!

iblis

MOH wrote:

Don't believe anything that starts with 'my mate'. As in:

"My mate just drove past Citywest and they're knocking down the Smart Telecom building"

or

"My mate was on a plane with Osama bin Laden, chief executive of Smart, who told him his plan to undermine the global telecommunications industry by investing loads of his own money in a company he was then giong to fold"

or

"My mate says ComReg are an efficient regulatory body who have levelled the playing field in the Irish telecoms market, and prevented Eircom abusing their monopoly."

Blah blah blah...

This happens to be my flatmate. As such he's just as caught up in this as anyone else and called over to the smart office to try and get some information about wtf is going on, which would have benefitted us all. It just so happens the CityWest Buildings Directory is out of date.

On top of that, I didn't post that here. Someone else did.

scout353

Sitting at my desk when second line rang (this line is with UTV) and person asks for me by name and says he is with eircom and knows my other line is with Smart and would I be interested in returning to eircom. I asked how he could know that and he said he was just ringing a list and did not know what company any of the people were with.

I find that to be a disgrace - they are kicking a company when it's down but also breaking all procedures as far as I am aware.

Blackdragon

scout353 wrote:

Sitting at my desk when second line rang (this line is with UTV) and person asks for me by name and says he is with eircom and knows my other line is with Smart and would I be interested in returning to eircom. I asked how he could know that and he said he was just ringing a list and did not know what company any of the people were with.

I find that to be a disgrace - they are kicking a company when it's down but also breaking all procedures as far as I am aware.

They are some chancers aint they - so how did the rest of that conversation go down?:)

scout353

Blackdragon wrote:

They are some chancers aint they - so how did the rest of that conversation go down?:)

I told him that I would wait to see what was going to happen - he told me that we would have 2 weeks to choose a new operator. When I said that seems to indicate that Smart will be gone by then he said most definitely.

I told him I was going to look at all the options in the market before deciding so he gave me his mobile number and told me to call him if I wanted imediate connection to eircom.

Have been checking other companies and Talk Talk or Perlico seem to be the best - I am staying with UTV for internet so it is just the voice for the Smart line so we'll see. If only I could find a company that does cheap fixed to mobile calls as that is the bulk of the bill now!! (daughter calling Boyfriend and other her other mates :rolleyes: )

art

why not post his name here and mobile number. (Just for abusive purposes, I mean, rather than information)

kaizersoze

scout353 wrote:

Sitting at my desk when second line rang (this line is with UTV) and person asks for me by name and says he is with eircom and knows my other line is with Smart and would I be interested in returning to eircom. I asked how he could know that and he said he was just ringing a list and did not know what company any of the people were with.

I find that to be a disgrace - they are kicking a company when it's down but also breaking all procedures as far as I am aware.

Have a read of this thread and email Ireland Off Line with the details.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054998761

Cuddlesworth

art wrote:

why not post his name here and mobile number. (Just for abusive purposes, I mean, rather than information)

Many reasons. It's illegial. He's only doing his job and if he does it well he gets paid well. Most customers are going to go back to smart first. What I would do is ring the sales line, ask to speak to the managing directer and ask him how was your number aquired by eircom and give the sales persons name. I think all is not above board here with some of the sales staff.

JNive

Blackdragon wrote:

If you were able to ring your smart number then your order is already complete my friend. So if i were you i would wait untill the dust settles and see what happens next:)

It wasnt complete, all numbers ring whether they are conencted or not, when ringing out from the phone its stillt he old number, and ringing in required the old number also. im just stating that if the new number im assigned has suffered from the 'cant ring in' syndrome would that have any effect on whether the broadband order has been halted or cancelled at this stage.

Richard Dower

Disgusted by this debacle, i blame Eircom...it will scare off people from changing provider.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Richard Dower wrote:

Disgusted by this debacle, i blame Eircom...it will scare off people from changing provider.

I agree, they could have hanlded a bit more delicately.
We had our phone number with eircom for over 10 years... had to change it when switching to Smart... now I've no idea what's going to happen... can we get our old number back from eircom? or will we have our third landline number this year?
As much as I resent eircom, I'd almost go back to them to alleviate my headache.
The message I've gotten from all of this is - if you're not with eircom, we can't protect you or guarentee what will happen.

And there's some very poor leadership on the part of Smart here, who've been far too quiet for my liking.
Hopefully they'll finish talking about the situation behind closed doors and actually let us know what the hell is going to happen.

jimmycrackcorm

DonkeyStyle \o/ wrote:

I agree, they could have hanlded a bit more delicately.
...
And there's some very poor leadership on the part of Smart here, who've been far too quiet for my liking.
Hopefully they'll finish talking about the situation behind closed doors and actually let us know what the hell is going to happen.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that the smart website doesn't have any information on it other than this watch this space message....

If they were trying to keep their customers wouldn't they at least post some up to date status information other than:
"Please note any Smart Telecom customers experiencing loss of voice service. We expect to have full service resumed as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."

It comes across as of minor insignificance rather than teetering on the brink of liquidation..