got a phone call from eircom -new packages.

polishpaddy

I have Home Professional.
It's €48.60 a month.

Download = 7.6Mb
Upload = 672kpbs
Contention ratio 24:1

When she rang and offered me 7 megabit broadband i asked her would there be any difference in the broadband.She says no and it's going to be alot cheaper when I opt in for one of their new bundles. I said cautiously, would my ping be affected, to which she asked me, "what that was", so, I didn't even bother explaining it to her. As she's only a "sales person".... Obviously not to know such things.

Anyway, she wanted me to make up my mind over the phone, but I said could you send out a contract so I can look at it. She said no, but the packages were on the website to look at,which was fine.
I said I would have a look them, and make up my mind and get back to her. She gave me her name and number so i could credit her with the sale.

So after hanging up the phone, I go to check the stats of the new package she is offering me.

download 7megabit
upload 384kbps
contention 48:1

Now, as you can see, theres a massive difference.She said to me, it was only the download speed that was changing, from 7.6 to 7 meg.Maybe she didn't know any better? - I'm not sure.So for 8 euro less a month or something, they want to double my contention, half my upload, and reduce my download by .6megabits, and they want me to pay 8 euro less for it? Am i missing something here, or am i correct in thinking there greedy swines?

So, I could save 30 quid off my bill by getting this bundle off eircom, or, I could stick with the one i have.I'm starting to think their networks are getting clogged up or something.The pings are terrible and every tom dick and harry is stealing the internet off there neighbours.

I live in cobh, co cork so the bt24 meg isn't here just yet, it's in near by ballincollig though.Bastards.......

MickyJoe

The name of the new package would be helpful so we can look at what you're referring to.

MickyJoe

Having looked around I reckon it's the "7Mb broadband eircom home advanced" you're referring to. Not much other info than you're already provided.

I would say that if you're getting a call from Eircom trying to sell you a package that's cheaper than you're already on then they must be saving more than the value of the savings than you're going to make.

If you're not happy be with you have already then I think you're going to be even less happy with the lesser specs. Have to outweight the savings against the potentially losses from the higher contention ratio. If you do a fair bit of uploading then you're going to suffer big time.

I recently got a friend who was on the 20 hour/month broadnband to go onto always on broadband bundle. Thought the "eircom friends bundle (1Mb)" at 45.11 looked good. She makes a lot of calls to her parents in Scotland and got a shock when her bill arrived - the package charges call to the UK at 20.08 (anythime") cent/minute which is nearly five cent (~33%) per minute more than having no bundle or package at all making calls at peak time (15.42) or nearly eight cent per minute higher (~61%) than weekend rates (12.49).

I think that as you've already suggested - if you think you're going to be making savings then make sure to read all the specs and in particular the contract before signing up to make sure you're not going to be losing out somewhere and if so how is it going to affect you. Is the (potential) degradation of service outweighed by the saving involved. I rang Eircom and Comreg complaining about the rates above being higher than their published rates for normal calls but the answer was basicly that the higher rates were in the contract so tough look ! SO - thread carefully