Eircoms Next Special Offer Yellowpack BB 20 Hours a Month

Sponge Bob

Yellowpack DSL is a 20 Hour a month product for €20 a month incl VAT.

Story

http://www.rte.ie/business/2005/0616/eircom.html

The CAP is TIME BASED so

"[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]customers will be charged four cent a minute for additional usage."

Thats €2.40 an hour or €57.60 a DAY for every day you bust your cap and you are GUARANTEED to bust your Cap in a day, even if all your PC does is check for that email from Mary in Australia every 30 minutes .

EDIT. Fortunately it transpired after the PR announcement linked above that wiser heads in Eircom had spotted the potential disaster and that the price has an upper cap of €50 a month but nobody told the PR bunnies .

The risk to other users in a given 48:1 contention group is that if someone leaves it on overnight twice in a month they may as well [/font][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]completely [/font][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]tear the arse out of it the rest of the month as there is no Data Cap thereafter so it could be really sloooooooow in the last 10 days of every month


[/font]

Mr E

Thats bloody crazy.... Its not April 1st, is it?

[Edit] They're targetting low-use dialup customers with that, not linux-distro, torrent-loving users....... I suppose its not bad for the people who log on once a night for a half hour to check email.....

Creamy Goodness

even my dad would use the twenty hours no problem and he only checks mails.

the major selling point behind broadband (except it's speed) is that it's always on and doesn't tangle up the phone line.

eircom have brought dsl to a extremely new low.

Scruff

€ircom are some bunch of tossers. Desperatley bastardising broadband so they can rape the irish public like they used to with dial up.
I'd say the majority of people who sign up for that wont have a clue that bb is always on and that they will HAVE to turn off their modems after use.
What a shower or ****.

Sponge Bob

There is no peak/offpeak either , as long as the modem is on you pay . 20 hours a month is 45mins a day not half an hour .

They'll catch you if you type that reply email slowly

Urban Weigl

This new product could cause a slipped disc by making you bend over to unplug your "broadband connection" every time you finish checking yer mail.

bealtine

Urban Weigl wrote:

This new product could cause a slipped disc by making you bend over to unplug your "broadband connection" every time you finish checking yer mail.

aye bend over while reaching for the vaseline...

SnotNosedGit

I think its a con.
They are preying on naivity there.
If they are going to do this and someone gets a bill for over €1000 then i'm sure that person would have a case again Eircon

Creamy Goodness

doubt it as long as they spell out the terms and conditions the customer won't have a legal leg to stand on

bk

This is ridiculous, Eircom really don't want to introduce a BB product for less then €40 per month. Eircom are trying to do this to spur their flagging BB uptake figures, as most people don't want to pay €40 per month. However most people don't want time based services either.

Most people want an entry level, always on BB product for €20 - €25 per month, like NTL 1m service or many DSL services in the UK.

Eircom get a clue, NTL, Smart, IBB and Clearwire are going to cut you to shreds if you don't get your act together.

damien

Press release on the way. They were not meant to announce this til July!

Mr_Man

does anyone know anywhere else in the world where a BB connection has been metered in this way? Or is this an Irish solution to an Eircom problem?


M.

SkepticOne

It is an indication that Eircom still operate in monopolistic terms. In order to extract maximum revenue from different segments of the market they arbitrarily cripple services.

I don't think there's any justification for limiting DSL in this way. They still need a dedicated port on the DSLAM and they still need to send out a modem. The costs to Eircom are likely to be much the same. It may even cost more to monitor usage but from the point of view of a monopolist seeking to maximise revenue it makes sense: extract as much as possible from each segment of the market and cripple the service in various ways so that you need to pay more to get the full potential.

It is similar to Microsoft's old practice of limiting network connections to ten in desktop versions of their operating systems. There is no technical need for it, they just want to protect revenue of their 'server' products so they cripple the lower priced versions in some way in order to make the more expensive ones more attractive.

Another practice I heard about in this regard was the cooker manufacturer, Belling, in the 50's manufacturing several versions of the a particular small cooker but installing a device on the cheaper versions that prevented more than one cooking ring from being operated at one time. Again, no technical reason for this. The purpose was simply to make the lower priced version worse so they could charge more for the non-crippled version thereby extracting maximum revenue from each segment of the market.

Crap like this disappears when competition enters. The fact that Eircom are introducing this indicates that Eircom are still the only real player in town. If ComReg allows this, it will mean that the pretence of cost-orientation is finally being done away with.

Praetorian

A virus, trojan or spyware could be responible for a huge bill. This has to be the most stupid product Eircom has ever announced.

seamus

This is a blatant money spinner, and if anything, it's an attempt to drag technology down, kicking and screaming.

Eircom know two things:
1. A lot of people with computers use their computers a lot more than 45 minutes per day, and not necessarily on the net.
2. With this mindset, people will think that as long as they're not surfing the net, they're not paying. After all, most broadband connections are connected while the machine starts up, it doesn't require user intervention.

Clearly if anyone is gullible enough to be sucked into this, they'll spend maybe two hours a day on the computer, net connected (but not surfing), and after a month, they'll have racked up a whopping €96 - money that will drop into eircom's coffers despite them not actually having done anything.

And with two-monthly billing, Agnes will owe eircom €192 before she realises anything is wrong.

Tony, you and your cohorts are scum, you should be locked up.

seamus

Cremo wrote:

doubt it as long as they spell out the terms and conditions the customer won't have a legal leg to stand on

I disagree. Any contract that this product would be based on would be wholly unreasonable. Unless eircom provided a full, frank and comprehensive explanation of how the service works, to each customer.

gombín

All,

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Regards.

seamus

gomb&#237 wrote: »

All,

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Regards.

Shocker. That's the last thing I expected. Still, you could get a proper service for half that €50 figure from some of the other providers.

Praetorian

Thanks for the response gombín.

Urban Weigl

The timeout won't help much when you have Windows automatically checking for updates, Outlook seeing if there's new mail, and so on. But at least there is a cap on the price, though as has just been said, €50 a month is more than you'd pay for otherwise (don't forget line rental, which brings the total to €75, a good bit dearer than Smart).

SkepticOne

bk wrote:

Most people want an entry level, always on BB product for €20 - €25 per month, like NTL 1m service or many DSL services in the UK.

Eircom get a clue, NTL, Smart, IBB and Clearwire are going to cut you to shreds if you don't get your act together.

I think Eircom are being quite clever here.

At this point in time NTL, Smart, IBB, Clearwire are still only in certain areas. Eircom are very slowly entering into a phase where they are getting significant competition in a certain areas and no competition (still the majority) in others.

However their DSL offerings need to be standardised across all areas. The time-limited service can serve the twin purpose of competiting against NTL, Smart et al. on price (if not quality) in areas where they operate while extracting maximum revenue in those areas (most of Ireland) where Eircom have the monopoly.

Sponge Bob

gomb&#237 wrote: »

The modems that are being sent with this are configured to switch off after 30 mins. inactivity, and charge is capped at €49.99

Thats means about 50% of users will end up paying €49.99 each month I'd say . Thanks for the clarification though Gombín, €49.99 is a bit steep but hardly a mugging .

If we take it that 50% of users will pay €20 a month and 50% pay €50 a month then the average is about €35 which is a netch below the €40 rate for the Bit Limited not Time Limited equivalent.

Over on Eircom Wholesale the product is called " Kronos " ....(being a play by some marketing droid on the Irish for pulling a tree out of (crann as .... céard ...... like) ???? innit ??? ) .

I make it a 6 month min contract same as the current entry level to which is is technically identical . I cannot see the rebilling rate for the per minute component

heggie

so if its the modem that monitors your time usage, whats to stop any of us signing up for this, then changing the modem? get bb for 20 per month

Sponge Bob

It monitors locally but it does not bill you or affect the billing process Heggie , DSL synch time or DHCP cumulative lease time with single lease = 29 mins per session is the only way to monitor a time based product that I can think of .

8track

I registered with Smart in March, expecting availabilty by the end of this month (as per their web site). Smart have now informed me by email in reply to my request for an update that my exchange (Letterkenny) is now delayed, but that they "anticipate" that it will be live by the end of the summer. However, they can't be sure of that and can't specify what they deem the end of the summer to be.

This could go on for months more, so I'm now thinking about going with Eircom home starter for six months, then move to Smart if available by then. Anyone see a downside to this (apart from shelling out more to Eircom)?

daymobrew

Cremo wrote:

doubt it as long as they spell out the terms and conditions the customer won't have a legal leg to stand on

seamus wrote:

I disagree. Any contract that this product would be based on would be wholly unreasonable.

I think I agree with Cremo. The eircom flat rate dial-up product has a nasty termination clause where you get charged per-minute rates between cancellation date back to date of previous bill. As this is in the T&C customers get screwed. I was charged per this clause but got a refund because they ignored my instructions to cancel after the billing date.
BTW, anyone know of a product or service where they (retro) charge a different rate when you tell them you've leaving? IMO that's what this clause means.
Office of Dir of Consumer Affairs say the clause is fair :rolleyes:

SkepticOne

Most of the issues being raised regarding billing issues also apply to dial-up and ISDN. If you leave your computer connected on these you also run up a huge bill.

Eircom aren't introducing any new problems here as far as I can see. True, one of the huge advantages of broadband is the always on capability (I would write this into the definition if I could) and the fact that no matter how long you stay on you get charged the same. This can also be done with dial-up and ISDN but is harder as resource use in these products is directly related to time spent per user, unlike DSL, but there is no reason why Eircom can't introduce arbitrary cripplement into DSL in order to limit its use in some way.

What will be interesting will be the wholesale version of this. Are Eircom going to monitor connections and disconnections on behalf of the reseller? How much more money would it cost to keep the user online a couple of more hours? I imagine for the purpose of costing, Eircom will assume the user is downloading continuously the entire time and charge accordingly. In reality the marginal cost of keeping a user on for an extra hour should be next to nothing. Apart from bandwidth, the only extra resource is IP addresses.

damien

They are going to be on the Last Word on TodayFM now.

Listen in and ring and comment

Comment Line 1850 715100
Text Line Meteor 085 4100102

dahamsta

Another cracker of a press release. The use of the word "fines" is a stroke of genius.

adam

Lobby group IrelandOffline today harshly criticised the new pay per minute broadband offering from eircom. Chairman of the group Damien Mulley stated "One of the major benefits of broadband is its always-on properties. eircom have effectively switched the clock back for Internet users who will now have to return to the dark days of timing their Internet activity for fear of incurring ridiculous penalties. Broadband is not meant to penalise users for being connected to the internet."
The Internet access trend over the past few years was first to move from dialup to flatrate dialup and then to always-on broadband. The new eircom offering now means consumers are back to a pay per minute charge.

IrelandOffline stated that this product will do nothing but increase peoples fear using broadband instead of encouraging them. This product will confuse anyone who is unsure of what to expect from broadband, having the effect of further decreasing the take-up rate in this country

"To charge €20 for 20 hours and then include a €2.40 an hour penalty for staying online and enjoying the benefits of broadband is scandalous. Eircom are introducing entirely artificial pricing mechanisms with this product.

Unlike a phone call, it costs eircom nothing for a broadband connection to be permanently connected. This is little more than a cynical ploy by eircom to price gouge consumers new to broadband who know no better." stated Committee member Aidan Whyte

"A 'light-user' broadband product should be based on data downloaded not time spent online, such as in the UK where BT's 'Broadband Basic' product is just as fast as BT's mainstream consumer broadband but has a 1Gb a month usage limit." he added.

"For 24/7 usage on an existing dsl product it will cost €40 a month. With the new eircom per minute product it will cost €20 to start with and with fines totaled in it will go up to €50. Additionally a user needs to then pay for the highest line rental in EU of just under €25. All these various pricing structures will needlessly confuse the consumer who simply wants broadband for a flat price but instead they are offered a pay per minute product for perpetuating eircom's revenue stream." commented Mulley

jack_christie

McR*^%$£"! is on the Last Word on Today FM in minutes

JC

SkepticOne

I partly blame DCMNR for this sort of thing. Their directive to ComReg to get the numbers up (regardless of quality, price or availability) means that ComReg are under pressure to approve this sort of rubbish.