Useless Eircom - No BB or Information for Cloghan Co.Offaly

Strawberry HillBilly

When we built our house 4 years ago the local exchange in Cloghan Co. Offaly was listed as Broadband coming.

In fact the Eircom engineer told her indoors that exchange was being switched on in a couple of months - 4 years on - exchange still not enabled and when talking with Eircom this afternoon I have been told they cannot give me any idea when the exchange might be enabled. Anyone have any insight as to status of Cloghan exchange.

Total and utter incompetence - another example of the Banana Republic we live in.

Ripplecom have just pinned their notices to local telephone poles advertising their 8mb service - anyone out there using their service - don't want to gamble €50 a month on more crap service when our Vodafone 3g is delivering 1-2mb for €20 a month

Cheers

Billy

Sponge Bob

Not aware that Cloghan was ever announced.

Most rural exchanges were on one of these 2 lists below. Salesmen obviously went door to door lying to get a sale but most eircom techs are pretty honest and straightforward in my opinion.

http://www.mulley.net/2006/10/19/eircom-to-enable-another-100-exchanges-120k-more-people-can-avail-of-broadband/

List of 100 Exchanges

http://www.mulley.net/2007/04/04/eircom-announce-another-300-additional-exchanges-to-be-enabled-no-timeframe/

List of 319 exchanges.

Cloghan CGH appears on neither of them.

Furthermore the final list was never completed. eircom abandoned work on the remaining 15 exchanges in 2011 and shut down their Broadbandatoz site too.

Strawberry HillBilly

Thanks Sponge Bob - tbf - we never had a door to door salesman, the exchange was listed on Eircoms own website - we checked it out prior to making decision to get a landline as we had discussed not even getting a landline when we both had mobiles.

Re: technician - he was dead on, when the wife got talking to him they established they had friends in common we knew in Eircom when living in UK - once installation was finished he went back into local exchange and came back 10 mins later to say that when exchange was enabled in a couple of months he had ensured that we would have the best possible speeds from exchange. Don't know how he could have fixed that but taking him at face value especially when he had no reason to come back to the house to tell us that.

Just p**sed of with spending €35 a month to make €2 worth of calls on the false promise of broadband coming sometime in the far off future

Sponge Bob

Get rid of the landline and save yourself €35, they have no intention of enabling Cloghan. Tell them you will come back if they ever supply broadband and not to annoy you before then. Rural Ireland has namy people who spent a lot of money waiting for eirocm to do what they promised. Kilrickle in Galway and Oldtown in Kilkenny and Calverstown in Kildare for example.

€1000 wasted in line rental, for nothing. They listed another Cloghan in Donegal which does have Broadband now...on the larger of the two lists.

Strawberry HillBilly

thanks for that Sponge Bob.

Anyone got any good experiences with Ripplecom ?

Chef-1st

I'm not that far away from Offaly, over in Longwood, Co. Meath. Been with ripplecom a year, and all I can say is stay clear.
Terrible poor service all round. Nothing seems to get fixed, speeds are really poor during the afternoon/evening times.
The odd time you get a max speed of 5M download and 0.9M up (I'm on the 8M package), but that's as high as it ever goes, and that's only in the morning when everyone else is in work or school. You can't rely on it at all though.
They are only still in business because some people can't get anything else except mobile broadband (dongle).

lubo_moravcik

Chef-1st wrote: »

I'm not that far away from Offaly, over in Longwood, Co. Meath. Been with ripplecom a year, and all I can say is stay clear.
Terrible poor service all round. Nothing seems to get fixed, speeds are really poor during the afternoon/evening times.
The odd time you get a max speed of 5M download and 0.9M up (I'm on the 8M package), but that's as high as it ever goes, and that's only in the morning when everyone else is in work or school. You can't rely on it at all though.
They are only still in business because some people can't get anything else except mobile broadband (dongle).

I'm in Longwood too and as someone struggling on with Ripplecom, I would have to agree with every bit of this post.

Strawberry HillBilly

Thanks for feedback, having got some reports from other users in the area we went ahead and got Ripplecom installed last week - so far so very good - using speedtest.net I am regularly seeing speeds between 6 to 8meg download (max advertised is 8meg) and upload of 1 meg.

Ping is ca. 25 - 40 ms so all good for us.

To be fair to Ripplecom, very good customer service so far and really good and neat install.

Maybe just one of the lucky ones I guess. Having suffered with 3G dongle and regular 0.1meg download - this is such a huge change. Strange to be getting excited about such (still) paltry download speeds but beggars not being choosers and all that !!

Chef-1st

S'berry - I'm glad you're happy with Ripplecom. Although I will say, this is early days. We were all in the same honeymoon boat at the start. They prioritise their new customers to keep them happy. Give it two months and then see how it is.

Lubo_M - keep an eye on the service over the next week or two. I know it's been terrible in Longwood lately. Seemingly, we're getting a new mast/transmitter in the area to compensate for the overly congested mast in Rathmolyon. I think the Longwood customers are getting our receiver redirected to this new mast in the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted of developments if you want.