I really dont like eircom very much.

Occidental

But surely that’s the problem, they won’t. At the top are the management don’t give a damn, and intend to be long gone before anyone gets to line them up against a wall. In the middle you have the old staff with their legendary job guarantees who also don’t give a damn (been milking the company for decades and will continue to do so until they retire). If the going gets too tough they will simply take redundancy and leave with a final lump of flesh. At the bottom you have the new staff who are expected to do all the work, while being shat on by both the management and the old staff (and therefore fairly quickly don’t give a damn either).

I can quite easily imagine another Telco buying Eircom in the next three or four years. Shortly after they will change the name, change the management, all the bitterness and hate will vanish and we will give them yet another chance. After all, the company will no longer be Eircom and all the people who screwed us for so many years will be long gone.

God, this is depressing

aidan_dunne

Originally posted by Occidental
Eircom are exactly the same as Aer Lingus before the advent of Ryanair. A lazy bloated company with an ethos of maximum profit for minimum effort. Low cost ADSL would incur lots of effort, for a possible slight increase in profit. Far better to introduce high cost ADSL, muddy the waters and carry on milking people for a few more years.

That's a pretty good point, Occidental. Look at Aer Lingus. They're in deep $hit at the moment and their ethos has started to seriously backfire on them. They sat back and let things carry on as they were and refused to change with the times. The result? Now they're on the verge of collapse.

Just this week Ryanair posted another profit. Love them or hate them, you have to give them credit for managing to continue posting profits at a time when the airline industry is in a bad spot. They did the complete opposite of Aer Lingus and managed to change with the times and, as a result, they're flying along (pardon the pun! ).

As you say, Eircom are like Aer Lingus, a big fat lazy fatcat who doesn't care about anything but milking the customers for as much moola as they can. Particularly in the area of ADSL, the analogy is perfect. Ryanair has operated on the "tons of cheap seats" policy and it has worked, they're making lots of money and have lots of customers. If Eircom did the same thing with ADSL and lowered the price to attract more customers, they'd make a whole ton more money than they are at the moment. Their current Aer Lingus-style policy of pricing it ridiculously high is not going to attract customers.

Eircom need to change from being like Aer Lingus to being more like Ryanair if they want to survive because they are not going to survive in the marketplace if they continue with their old, stodgy, fatcat way of doing things. They need to get leaner and meaner and more fast paced, just like Ryanair.

PiE

Got the new eircom Phone Book today, gotta love how they dont even mention the existence of ADSL in the Products & Services section, where they plug ISDN.

Yah, you're really trying to sell it arent u guys.

popinfresh

you cant stop them from trying to make money.

But that's where the word "retarts" comes into the equation. If they drop their prices, more people will sign up and hence more money for eircom. Being an Eircom shareholder, I would rather they dropped the ADSL tarrifs, so that i can get descent internet connection and so that Eircom will be more profitable. All they have to do to get lots of people to sign up is give people a good deal..

Dustaz

Originally posted by popinfresh


But that's where the word "retarts" comes into the equation. If they drop their prices, more people will sign up and hence more money for eircom. Being an Eircom shareholder, I would rather they dropped the ADSL tarrifs, so that i can get descent internet connection and so that Eircom will be more profitable. All they have to do to get lots of people to sign up is give people a good deal..

2 things
1. Your not an eircom shareholder

2. They make more of a profit from selling adsl at that price and letting ppl pay by the minute when they dial up at 56k and isdn.

segadreamcast

Hmmmm... Eircom say they are advertising ADSL...yet, I see FAR more advertising for their new digital cordless phone, and those things have been around for years - hardly groundbreaking stuff? TV, Radio, Posters, D'unbelievables, leaflets with your phone bills yada yada yada...

Also, someone above mentioned 'loss leader' and seemed to be misusing the term - basically a loss leader is the first generation of a product until it makes back what has been spent on creating it (i.e. the xbox is a loss leader because Microsoft will only make the money back on games) so technically, right now, i-stream is a loss leader.

sceptre

Originally posted by dahamsta
They may find it funny, but they're the guys who'll be first against the wall. Like I said, this is the Real World; eventually, it's going to catch up to them. Eventually, I'm going to catch up to them.
No Logo

Ah, Naomi Klein's call to arms. Bedroom reading for the budding anarchist/marcher/rioter/general do-gooder. Loved it.

I think in the long run (which unfortunately is too bloody long imho) it will catch up to them. For a few reasons.

Given/Assumed:
Eircom is a company that overprices its products and relies on an effective monopoly and the ignorance of a general public that doesn't appear to know better (having little consumer choice) for its own fiscal health and survival.


From that I can conclude:
If people realise that they are getting little product choice, at an overpriced cost, AND there is an alternative product offering better value of which they are aware, Eircom will lose market share rather quickly.

At the moment there isn't really an alternative product offering better value.

DSL isn't available everywhere. The main competitors are limited to Limerick (and Ballina soon) in the case of Esat, the southeast in the case of Chorus, Dublin on the case of Leap and their ilk.

With regard to the regular phone products, Chorus appear to have a somewhat temperamental product that appears to be limited to people who are willing to take up their cable TV service. Esat offer proper competition to Eircom but their pricing structure isn't sufficiently cheaper than Eircom's to offer a real alternative, plus there's the call setup charge on every call. The one advantage they do seem to offer is treating a national call as a local call, but they fail here for two reasons - firstly they fail to advertise this properly, secondly many home users simply don't make very many daytime calls (the advantage disappears at night)

On an advertising level, Eircom are knig. Persnoally I may hate their adverts (and I do) but they advertise like crazy. They've flooded the airwaves and billboards pimping their products. It's almost impossible for Joe Soap to ignore it. As a result when Joe is getting in a new phone line, because he can only order it from Eircom (with the obvious proviso attached to Chorus above), he has to make a second decision to switch to Eircom. Lots of people don't make second decisions. Plus because of the advertising, Eircom have associated themselves with the Internet in Ireland. For many people, Eircom provide the Internet and well, that's it really.

So the solution/resolution?

If Esat (and others) can provide alternative products that offer obvious advantages over the Eircom products AND advertise them to raise public awareness that there is in fact an alternative with an advantage, firstly the public will become aware of this.

Also on a secondary level, PC shops that love adding a modem to a PC when they're pushing it out the door will be able to say "well, actually, the Internet isn't as expensive as you think. Look at this product here, see how cheap it is?"

On a tertiary level, many techy types have friends that won't even consider buying a DVD player without talking to "the source" - the friend they have that knows all things technical. The techy friend (and many of them are on this forum) will obviously push them towards the product that is cheaper, better and more user friendly. This is what, to a great extent, happened with NoLimits. Esat ran a few press adverts for the service but most of the user base seemed to come on board through word of mouth. Esat's mistake at the time was that they failed to follow through with additional advertising to raise the profile of the service with the general public (though, as it was intended as something of a loss-leader, perhaps they didn't want to set the market on fire before they needed to).

Esat eventually had an additional problem. Eircom was owned by the people that used Eircom as their phone provider. Most Eircom shareholders might not have considered using a competing company as their phone/internet provider as they would effectively be taking money from their own pockets and giving it to a private concern. Add to that that Esat was then taken over by BT and basically became a foreign company (though obviously a foreign company employing a lot of Irish people). This potential advantage has been lost by Eircom as Irish plebs no longer own it (though there does seem to be a core group of people who are convinced they are still shareholders - it's a bigger number than peole think - last I heard there were still 50,000 shareholders who hadn't reclaimed their cash)

So with the ownership advantage lost, if the competing companies can come up with products that offer an advantage over those offered by the Big Bad Monopoly and manage to have people hear about it, the market may turn relatively quickly.

And LLU is fairly important for that to happen. In the UK, with a more dense population for the greater part (at least in most of England), companies can offer a product in tandem with BT. In Ireland, with a telecoms regulator that doesn't appear to want to do much to solve the situation, a government that appears to be happy to wait to enact EU Directives that are alredy available for all to read and an incumbent national monopoly of a telecoms provider that will own the phone lines until they rot, LLU may be the one real possibility we have of change to the status quo while the three groups I've just mentioned seem happy with the ever annoying status quo.

Meanwhile companies like Microsoft (OT: another company that all the above statements could be applied to) are expanding their operations elsewhere rather than in the self styled "ehub of Europe"

More to come later: these are comments (not a rant) for now

Storm the barricades? Where do I sign up?

(edit)
Reading Noel's comment, I'm using "loss-leader" in the sense of getting a market share that will be of use in maintaining that market share at a profit when the market costs become such that the product can become profitable OR selling a product at a loss in order to make back the cash on selling additional products to that customer at a profit, using the customer base as leverage. Perfectly acceptable definition (but I'm obviously correctable on that)
(/edit)

Magic Monkey

Originally posted by sceptre

Esat offer proper competition to Eircom but their pricing structure isn't sufficiently cheaper than Eircom's to offer a real alternative, plus there's the call setup charge on every call.

Yeah, but Esat's ADSL services are uncapped. Most (all?) i-stream users (solo/multi) are annoyed at the download cap - they have to be careful of going over it or risk forking out mucho moolah, and splashing out for the 'enhanced' service isn't worth it (FAR too expensive).

AFAIK, Esat are offering better upstream speeds on their services (I think the most basic one is ~€100 a month, 512kbps/256kbps, no cap). I reckon, seeing as there isn't a great price difference, that once Esat comes to the same areas as Eircom that are offering ADSL, users will plump for ESAT, because there's no cap.

sceptre

Originally posted by Magic Monkey


Yeah, but Esat's ADSL services are uncapped. Most (all?) i-stream users (solo/multi) are annoyed at the download cap - they have to be careful of going over it or risk forking out mucho moolah, and splashing out for the 'enhanced' service isn't worth it (FAR too expensive).
(snipped the end)

Oh, you're absolutely correct, MM. I was speaking specifically about regular phone products (calls) there.

Mentioned Esat's DSL offering just above - the disadvantage with that at the moment is that it's only available in Limerick (and perhaps Ballina by now). At the moment they're not competition to Eircom outside these areas (to be precise they're not scompetition in these areas either as Eircom haven't launched there).

The point you make is very valid though (as well as true) - the Esat product offers more than the Eircom one at about the same price. And when Eircom and Esat are competing for the same market, assuming the products remain the same, anyone aware of the Esat offering won't go anywhere near Eircom for their DSL.

Magic Monkey

Originally posted by sceptre

Mentioned Esat's DSL offering just above - the disadvantage with that at the moment is that it's only available in Limerick (and perhaps Ballina by now). At the moment they're not competition to Eircom outside these areas (to be precise they're not scompetition in these areas either as Eircom haven't launched there).

Yeah, I thought it strange that Esat are doing outside Dublin and Eircom doing, err, inside Dublin simultaneously. Esat are allegedly providing ADSL in Dublin at the end of this year. I reckon there's some (sinister?) reason for this. Like, charging you to change over to Esat when they eventually come into Dublin.

I also heard that for each 24 ADSL connections in a certain area, they go into a 7' high DSLAM box at the exchange, which has (get this) a 1 *Mbit* line back to Eircom, but I don't know if that's true or not...

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Magic Monkey
Yeah, I thought it strange that Esat are doing outside Dublin and Eircom doing, err, inside Dublin simultaneously. Esat are allegedly providing ADSL in Dublin at the end of this year. I reckon there's some (sinister?) reason for this. Like, charging you to change over to Esat when they eventually come into Dublin.[/b]

Grant aid could be part of the reason. I believe Eircom are getting grants for installing DSL in other areas.

WhiteWashMan

do most of you have any idea how much like a bunch of screaming girls you sound like?

its all fine to bítch about it, but what do you propose?

what do you think should happen?

how should eircom realistically change their structure to benefit everyone?

youre not oging to get anything to happen unless there is a win-win situation going on.

stop bleating aobut the wrong of life, and start thinking abot how to make changes, or at least put forward some suggestions and stop acting like deer caught in headlights.

in other words...

put up, or shut up.

El_MUERkO

I'm gonna disconnect just outta spite..

As soon as leap make there SOHO service available in D9 I'm gone.

LoBo

well said sceptre (re: your long post)

Slutmonkey57b

Originally posted by WhiteWashMan
what do you think should happen?

how should eircom realistically change their structure to benefit everyone?

youre not oging to get anything to happen unless there is a win-win situation going on.

As I mentioned before, British consumers got something to happen that was definantly NOT what the monopoly provider wanted. The statutory tools exist to force a change of situation, they're merely not being used. If the government was serious about this e-hub business, adsl rollout, flatrate dialup etc would already be in effect because the regulator would have said "switch on those exchanges in 12 months time or we'll fine you a million a day."
Talk to your TD.

Matfinn

its almost been a year since eircom first launched ADSL onto the market. Nowgranted they had a legal struggle with the ODT over their pricing plans, but has any progress been made on the rollout of DSL since. I know they say it has been enabled in select Dublin exchanges, but that was a year ago. have they done anything to rollout DSL in the other parts of the country? I was thinking that they couldhave concentrated on rolling out DSL to other cities and towns while they were in their legal dispute, in order to get it done while they had alot of resources.

Just curious

Matt

gurramok

As I mentioned before, British consumers got something to happen that was definantly NOT what the monopoly provider wanted

It was a media led campaign(CUT helped as well) that brought pressure upon the gov over there. I remember the Sunday Times as one of the newspapers at the spearhead of the campaign to bring 56k flatrate to the masses. They even had a forum about it on their website

That is the missing element here, practically no-one in media circles is highlighting the issue....not surprising with Tony O'Reilly at the helm of Independent newspapers and considerable influence in Eircon/Chorus.

ando

argh.. got my phone bill today... €398 :eek:


:eek: :eek:


*because*

Downgrade isdn to pstn, get pstn line tested for dsl.. failed.. failed again.. failed 3 times.. upgrade to isdn.. 2 months surfing.... €398 ... ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH

segadreamcast

Originally posted by ando
Downgrade isdn to pstn, get pstn line tested for dsl.. failed.. failed again.. failed 3 times.. upgrade to isdn.. 2 months surfing.... €398 ... ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH

:-\ Downgrade isdn to pstn, get pstn line tested for dsl...passed...order it...it fails some other test upon the day of installation...2 months surfing *Cries*

:P Eircom must be making a wad of cash off all this messing with ISDN and PSTN lines.

dahamsta

Great post sceptre. I just don't have the energy these days...

Ah, Naomi Klein's call to arms. Bedroom reading for the budding anarchist/marcher/rioter/general do-gooder. Loved it.

Anarchists are muppets, I'm too lazy to march, I'm a pacifist, and I /really/ don't want to be called a "do-gooder"; so let's just settle on "activist" for now, kay? Kay.

Storm the barricades? Where do I sign up?

All in good time dear boy, all in good time. We'll start with the K Club, kay? Kay.

heh

adam