switching to smart from eircom?

SGTdewdew

Anyone switched from EIRCOM to SMART TELECOM?
They have a nice looking 'free' BROADBAND deal this month..
anyone use them? I read much of the small print in their
T&C.. seems ok.. whats the 'real' service like...
any recommendations to help help me decide??:rolleyes:

dudara

Moved to Broadband

dudara

DonkeyStyle \o/

http://support.smarttelecom.ie/forums/
Plenty of food for thought.

steve-o

Extremely good reliable service. Genuine speeds, exactly as advertised (assuing your line is good enough), no peak-time slowdowns. Great tech support on the forum.
Downside: Customer service sucks, so you should hope nothing goes wrong.

dingding

+1 except I developed a line fault and smart got Eircom to fix it in a couple of days. I think it went down Wednesday, They tried to fix themselves Wednesday. Rang them on Thursday and they had a Eircom engineer out on Friday, who fixed it in a couple of hours. i think it was a physical line fault back to the exchange.

They also rang me on Monday to check progress with the fault.

No complaints here.

Kensington

Go for it, fantastic service. No slowdowns or drop outs as mentioned above. To put it into perspective, my NTL broadband connection has gone down more times in the past six months than my smart broadband connection has gone down since I got it in roughly three years ago (have connections from both ISP's - don't ask!!!)

SGTdewdew

Oops, sorry for posting in the wrong place

Thanx for the words ppl.. The customer service part of the deal would be
least of my worries - I had 3 seperate faults in the 1st two weeks of
getting an eircom 'bundle' and had weeks of downtime -
so I know things break and customer care is that in name only.
I wanna change coz my "2mb" really expensive eircom line is
a pee-weak joke that barely hits 220kb!! and the thought of an
actual 3MB line - that even resembles a 3MB line is attractive as hell.
Nearly half price too:eek:

Apart from the initial faults, my eircom line is, as they say 'always on', but
it always seems to be 30% of what it's supposed to be..
Maybe I give Smart a call...
Any other tales pros and cons are welcome

Kensington

SGTdewdew wrote: »

I wanna change coz my "2mb" really expensive eircom line is
a pee-weak joke that barely hits 220kb!!

Is that 220KB/s, shown in an Internet Explorer download? Or 220Kb/s (such as on www.speedtest.net)? It sounds like you're confusing bits and bytes - if its 220KB/s then that's excellent for a 2Mb line - a 3Mb broadband connection will give speeds of about 350KB/s.

Do a test on www.speedtest.net and post the result back up here.

SGTdewdew

@ Kensington, thanx fer the correction.. I'm a tad doltish
Ya, I know that a 220kb d.load fer a 2MB line is thought of as OK,
but I want better, faster, stronger... hell, I want my 2mb line to
actually BE a 2mb line... I don't buy 10 cigarettes and think its OK
for only 4 to be in the box when I crack the pack open.
Smart (I'm being slowly told) are faster and on a 1:1 contention
and half the price of eircom :mad:
I've done numerous speed tests, my "2mb" line tops out at around 750kb
down and 128 up...... that's on a speed test - tho in reality it's 200kb
down and 24kb up...
Severeal speedtests I did 'red-flagged' me and told me
to contact my ISP as 'compression' was detected on my line..
No idea what much of it means, I just want what's advertised and chit hot
21st century broadband.... How are Smart with P2P ?
are their routers hard to forward the ports in?
anyone any more pro/con tales before I switch ISP ??
ThanX

Kensington

Smart don't throttle or shape any traffic, and only block the outbound e-mail, leaving the rest fully accessible. So if a seed has enough trackers and sources with good upload speeds then you'll have no problem hitting 3Mb on P2P.

Can't comment as regards port forwarding on their routers which they're giving to new subscribers - the router they give out to new customers (a Thomson Speedtouch) is different to the original Huawei Aolynk DR814 model given to customers who signed up over a year ago, which is the model of router I have.

Is it possible to post line stats from your current eircom modem setup? Its just one thing to be wary of is - if a fault with your line is causing your eircom connection to slow down then this fault will more than likely carry over to smart (or to any DSL provider you get on your line for that matter).

Overall though, the connection is great and you'll get the full 3Mb no matter what time you're using the net, it's fantastic!

pizzahead77

Kensington wrote: »

Smart don't throttle or shape any traffic, and only block the outbound e-mail, leaving the rest fully accessible. So if a seed has enough trackers and sources with good upload speeds then you'll have no problem hitting 3Mb on P2P.

They don't fully block outbound mail - the only SMTP server on port 25 you can use is theirs (smtp.mysmart.ie) to avoid people sending spam. But you can use Gmail that uses different ports than normal SMTP servers.