Line Rental Increase Announced

cgarvey

As expected, as soon as a government is announced, so too is the line rental increase.

From July 30th, your phone line rental will increase by €1.18. eircom are putting it down to higher wages (aren't they culling staff?), increased business costs (how much will be paid in bonuses?), and the need to continually invest in the network (insert NGN buzz terms here, but ignore the below-average investment in their core asset).

BUT... it's all OK. Why? Well because, as eircom inform us, the average bill will "remain below the EU average" for national & international calls. Heh, they can't even just say for typical calls (or the Call Basket, as they're referred to in ComReg quarterly reports).

Finally, they managed to slip in a "as with any other utility" in relation to the increased business costs, but fail to say that the only utilities to increase are ESB (who are faced with massively increased fuel costs, but manage to have a near complete world-class transmission network) and Board Gais (who, too, have massively increased fuel costs, but who have managed to cut prices to have of their increase). Any other "utility" increase?

Isn't the timing just spot on? Think somebody had a word with eircom to hold off until after the election?

TheBigEvil

I posted this in the broadband section too.... Would you consider cancelling your phone line???? Lets fight back !

Incredible, absolutely incredible. Another increase in line rental.....over €25 just to have a phone line, and nothing can be done about it. They don't have to apply to the regulator for the increase.

How many people here would seriously cancel their €ircon phone line, to send a message to them. Enough people bitch about the prices they charge, not just for their line rental. Isn't it time the people using the service sent a message to €ircon? If enough people canceled their phone service with them, I'm sure they'd have to take notice and do something.

watty

Since privatisation the phone lines has fallen from 82% to just under 70%. I cancelled last December. I think if it fell just 5% they would simply increase the price.

The message has been sent already and they aren't listening.

crawler

Boo watty!! - boo!!

TheBigEvil

watty wrote:

Since privatisation the phone lines has fallen from 82% to just under 70%. I cancelled last December. I think if it fell just 5% they would simply increase the price.

The message has been sent already and they aren't listening.

I hear what your saying, but at the end of the day, €ircon are selling a service, and if people don't subscribe to it they have to do something about it, and in that they should be restructuring their pricing to a fairer base.

If they wont listen to their customers, then deserve, in my opinion, to be run out of business (I know, I know!), but in fairness how far do you squeeze people for money, or how far will people let themselves be squeezed by €ircon.

After all a land-line is not a necessity, and people can buy a cheap mobile phone and pay as you go with it.

I understand people need it for broadband, but alternatives are appearing, especially things like vodafone and 3s broad band cards.

If enough people cancelled their phone service in protest to this latest increase (letting them know why they are cancelling it), the money grabbing idiots at €ircon would have to sit up and take notice, they would have to do something.

It's time we were stopped being taken as mugs, and said enough is enough. Already the most expensive land-line rate in europe, and getting more expesnsive.

The regualator cannot do anything about this increase, but we as customers of €ircon can.

Sponge Bob

now now crawler

the 3g operators will have a field day with this IMO .

o2 are to announce a competitive hsdpa package which is bound to cost less than eircom line rental.

3 already offer one as we know for €19.99 .

Voda will trim their 5gb offering back to €24.99 ...inside the rental window

Meteor 3g ....when it devapourises......will have to offer something similar . This will be an interesting conundrum for eircom

The mobile operators have the collective marketing clout to hurt eircom for this !!!!!

eircom really should launch adsl2+ to counter . quite a lot of eircom customers would get a stable 2mbits at 3 miles with adsl2+ where they currently get a rather marginal 2mbits . 3 miles is beyond hsdpa range and will continue to be given th'oul laws of physics .

The customer would get a stable 1mbit at 4 miles or even 4.5miles . Again it beats hsdpa .

even without any new packages ....owing to there being no Smart in the pipeline to rescue the consumer ....this would improve matters straight away for all parties and would enable eircom to acquire customers who cannot get 3g data packages because of distance.



The vast majority of modems deployed by eircom will do adsl2+ as it is .

RuggieBear

i cancelled a few months back. just couldn't stomach paying eircom any more money. getting the girlie to switch from meteor too:)

dahamsta

I cut the cord completely in January, now on wireless with an excellent company called Airwave, and VOIP with Blueface. It costs more, but I'd prefer to pay more than give it to the lying scumbags in Eircom. Very liberating.

BT are still trying to bill me of course, but sure they're probably billing leprechauns and dolphins and lighthouses too.

adam

cgarvey

I'm gone now too, thanks to Digiweb Metro. While the Metro phone service has been far from reliable for me, it certainly is fine when it works, and is a hell of a lot better than paying that amount of money per month for a phone line that I use so little of anyway (what with Skype, and a mobile).

The added bonus is having the chance to chat with the Win Back guys!

SkepticOne

I've been with Digiweb metro for a while now so this rise is not my problem. Do your worst Eircom!

mike65

But do they know? Okay people here are early adopters but if this sort of thing catches on, why it could be the death of eircom. Okay me dreams....

Mike.

lucernarian

eircom's line rental price will continue to rise, but a lot of rural Ireland will stick with them. Why? Because there is no reliable communications alternatives. Mobile coverage still leaves a lot to be desired. Even if signal strength is okay in the area, concrete walls and foil-lined insulation put pay to that.

MMDS and telephony seems to be dead now. And the majority are not willing to put their trust/money in VoIP, that is if they heard of it. You can forget about actual cable. I didn't even hear of cable existing in Ireland until I was 14, me living in MMDS land.

A lot of moderately-sized towns have eircom DSL and usually a local wireless provider and nothing else.

It is a shame and disgrace that a natural monopoly situation should be allowed to make a silly amount of money on it, to subsidise the rest of its business. It's time it was linked to the level of investment. It's 6 years late, but it's better than never.

mike65

I really wish the government had split eircom into two companies leaving the "grid" in public ownership.

Mike

Liam Byrne

mike65 wrote:

I really wish the government had split eircom into two companies leaving the "grid" in public ownership.

Mike

So do most people in the know (and, in fact, that would have been the sensible thing, since it was our network to begin with). Chalk another one up to FF/PD (and still people voted them in again :rolleyes: )

What REALLY pisses me off is that even those of us who have given the two fingers to eircom because of their ridiculous prices are STILL paying the rip-off merchants, while those who have invested in decent ADSL2+ BB, like Smart, are barely ticking over on the amount left over after they pass on most of what I pay them to eircon :mad:

Will be moving house before the year is out, and I'd love to bring Smart with me, but it's looking like I won't even bother to reconnect the phone line (it's disconnected in the house in question since last month because it's being renovated).

mike65

Trouble is had they done that the float valuation would have been halved I guess. I wonder what we got for the 4.5 billion they raised? Oh I remember - public pension featherbedding.

Mike.

Solair

Well, as soon as I can put an antenna on the roof, I'm dropping my landline. Can't stomach any more eircom hikes either. It's not at all value for money!
In an apartment right now, no NTL broadband due to the state of the local cable infrastructure and no permission to install a digiweb or other antenna externally. The broadband in a box solutions are just too slow.

I think eircom's screwed if the mobile companies' offering develop further. Those mobile broadband packages are getting very competitive, but I still like the option of a landline (delivered over PSTN/VoIP/Cable.. don't really care which).

bealtine

cgarvey wrote:

Isn't the timing just spot on? Think somebody had a word with eircom to hold off until after the election?

And the demise of IoffL was rather helpful as well. Now there is no one to puncture the eircom hot air machine...