Are phone lines in Ireland made of Swiss cheese?

OfflerCrocGod

I've just come back to Ireland for the Christmas holidays to find my family bemoaning the state of broadband in the house and talking about moving to Eircom from BT for BB.

The cause of the constant disconnects seems to be the very poor quality of the line, the modem is dropping the line all the time.

5376 kbps 512 kbps
SNR 3.5 dB 0.0 dB
ATEN 48 dB 27 dB

This is with nothing plugged into the line, just the ADSL filter. Apparently an Eircom engineer came out a year ago and said the line is fine. Obviously Eircom's meaning of the word 'fine' is different to the rest of the English speaking world's meaning.

The line is clearly not fit for purpose so I was wondering what legal recourse do I have to force Eircom to re-lay/fix the line?

I will ask BT to downgrade to 1Mb tomorrow but it would be much better if we had a working line instead of this wet string. I'm in the Hartstown area of Dublin 15 and we seem to be covered by Eircom only in terms of BB.

Has anyone else experience this critical line failure and been able to get Eircom to acknowledge and fix the problem?

PogMoThoin

Your line is syncing at 5mbit and struggling, downgrade to 3mbit and You should be fine

Shredd

I've been experiencing exactly the same problems for around the last 4 months. I've been complaining weekly (well, back-to back complaints+follow-ups) and they there is still no improvement in the quality of the line. As you mentioned as well, Eircom is the only BB provider in the area.

Another thing i might add is that the customer support and Eircom BB engineers seem to be wayyy off in terms of communication. No matter what you tell their customer support and no matter how many proof you have of the line being total crap (i went to the point of logging every single disconnect one night while i was online), you'll still get engineers giving you a quick call to say that they did a line-test in the middle of the day and could find no faults. I always reply by saying that unless they had changed/fixed something, that the line definitely was not ok. That same night when i'd call support to check how the case was going, they'd ?say that it had been resolved and the engineers had signed it off.

That said, reading through these forums the general consensus is to keep on complaining to Eircom and that they will eventually do something about the problem. I don't know how many complaints it will take you but i personally know that I am on roughly complaint number 9 and that the line is no better than it was when i started to complain regularly about it back in august. Good luck.

Sponge Bob

Plug it in WITHOUT the filter next time and with all the other gear disconnected.

I had a peculiar weather condition ( drizzle/heavyfog + slight easterly or south easterly wind) where water got in and destabilised my line. If rain was slamming in sideways from a force 8 south westerly the line was fine.

It took the local engineer 2 years to find it but seeing as the conditions only occur 2 days a year that is not surprising.

We just had a period of dry weather after a period of wet weather, did matters improve any ????

katnia

I used to work in the Broadband & Line Fault department of a well known telecom supplier (not Eircom). Unfortunately they won't replace the line if you are not getting the BB you are paying for as they are under no obligation to provide you with BB, just a working phoneline. BB is an add on & as I say they don't have to replace your line just so you can have this service, however, as you are paying for a service that is clearly not being provided, they should look into it, try & fix the problem if possible & if they can cannot fix it then disconnect the service & give you a refund.

I agree with the other poster, downgrade to 3 meg & everything should be ok, also if you take off the faceplate of your main socket, there should be another socket behind it, plug your ADSL filter into & it's like connecting directly into the line outside without any interference from internal wiring (you could certainly do this in the north, I assume the Eircom set up is the same thing?). If your BB is then ok, you have a problem with the internal wiring that is affecting your service.

Also, I live 2 miles away from our telephone exchange & I can't get BB so I would agree with you that the lines seem to be made of Swiss Cheese, it's quite crazy in this day & age that we seem to be operating on a '3rd World' telephone network.

Hope you get it sorted....