New phonewatch alarm completely screws up both broadband and landline phone. HELP!!!

hatrickpatrick

I'm literally being driven insane right now. Our old eircom phonewatch alarm, which had served us for more than 14 years and rarely if ever caused us actual grief, finally gave up the ghost a few weeks back. Fair enough I saw, it lived a very productive and fulfilling life and was the epitome of a fantastic alarm system to us. (If anyone knows the one I'm talking about, it's the white one with the deep male robotic voice who says things like "Phone call O.K." and "Door! Sensor three- back! door! Open at TEN- FOR-TY FIVE, PEE EMM, NOW OH - KAY"

This new one, however, is a beast. They connected it to our phone line so it can communicate with eircom, fair enough. And so began the most intense frustration I've experienced in a long time.

First of all, the landline and broadband are connected to the same wall socket with a little grey splitter box hanging out of it. Always have been. I dunno what the alarm people changed, but now, whenever anyone makes or receives a call on the landline phone, the broadband connection just dies. The DSL Sync light goes off on the router and trying to restart it gives you a message saying "Connection is down, please make sure the DSL Sync light is on and try again". Not much help.

Worse still, the alarm itself is constantly disconnecting phone calls. It went off this morning and the kind people at Eircom neglected to tell us that we had a new pass code, so we couldn't get it to turn off. So I tried ringing my dad who is away to ask him if he had the code, and every few minutes the phone line would just die. When I rang phonewatch, the guy actually WARNED me about this, he asked for my mobile number in case we got cut off. When I asked him to explain what he meant, he rather cheerfully explained that "Oh yeah the alarm uses the phone line to send signals so if it's going off you can forget about using the phone." ****ing brilliant.

Seriously, has anyone else had this HORRIFIC experience and is there anything at all we can do about it short of getting a completely separate phone line for the alarm? Eircom support, either phonewatch or broadband, are as usual absolutely no help at all in fixing anything so I'm asking here if anyone else knows. Are we doomed to actually live with an intermittant phone line and internet connection for the remainder of our time as Phonewatch customers? I cannot and will not accept this.

And on a side note - WHY is it that modern technology sucks so damn much? I always absolutely DREAD hearing that I must "upgrade" something now, as this nearly always means that a perfectly good piece of technology is going to be replace with an utterly crappy one. And I was born in 1989, it's not like I'm comparing 70s stuff to noughties or anything. Case and point, Windows XP > Windows Vista, Firefox 2 > Firefox 3, Safari 3 > Safari 4, etc... Why is this? Why does "upgrading" now mean settling for less? Even with mobile phones, I'll be damned if I ever trade in my beautiful Nokia 6234 for something more "modern:, I've test driven all of them and they SUCK in comparison to the features of this.

What's going on?

Sponge Bob

Dunno this new system but it seems like a cowboy was contracted to install it. Tell phonewatch to get their asses out to fix the problems which are basically a cowboy install with phone/dsl filters probably reversed from the sound of it.

Cancel the DD straight away and tell them they can get cheques when it works.