Line Rental Increase

Sar!

How much will we all take before we tell eircom where to shove it!!!! I cant believe that in this day and age a MONOPOLY is allowed hike up the prices when then like as often as they like - i mean its as bad as the television licence!!!

Why is it that other companies such as UTV or ESAT cant fight to get ownership of the lines too so at least Irish people have a goddam choice!!

Looks like now instead i just wont have a landline in the house - its far too ruddy expensive!!!!! Also a warning to all those people out there who havent already set a landline up - if you are thinking of doing it - think again!!!! I had serious hassle recently when i moved house and eircom nicely neglected to tell me that when you start a new number (not new line) they will try to charge you for a NEW LINE and also TWO MONTHS rental in advance - therefore before you have even picked up youre goddam phone youre being charged near €180 euro for the privelage seeing as they lump VAT ontop of those charges!!! (i have sinced argued this with three lengthly phonecalls to a complete idiot who then copped on they had made a mistake - still had to pay two months in advance tho......)

spongebob

Originally posted by Mossy Monk
is this for real. Eircom should have been doing this with years. even 33.6 k is more than twice what i'm getting at the moment. it doesn't justify another increase though :mad:

The Line Rental is ringfenced from the genral Eircom budget and is for network maintenance.

The general network is in a shocking state .....for an allegedly developed country. Now that Eircom have increased the line rental ....dramatically......they can no longer claim not to have the resources to upgrade the copper nationwide.

This will mean

1. No More crappy pairgains . Some will be replaced with WLL which is a form of wireless ISDN . Minimum speed is 56k according to the EU directive. That means 50k close to the exchange dropping no lower than 33.6k at 5 miles which is the nominal maximum length of an analogue line. This will have a noticeable effect in Rural areas.

2. A noticeable reduction in the line test failure rate for Broadband in Urban Areas. If your analogue line is good you should pass if you are within 2.5-3 miles of an enabled exchange.

3. Comreg are probably going to jointly designate Vodafone/O2 as the Wireless USO carriers in rural areas along the west coast. They may also force both to allow mutual roaming and to allow Meteor users to roam on their network.

Comreg has murmered approvingly about 1EV-DO (letter o) as a wirleless broadband solution in rural areas, this gives speeds of around 256k and runs over frequencies ALREADY ALLOCATED TO Vodafone and O2 . It can handle seamless cell to cell transition for mobile users with laptops too, unlike 802.11XXX Wireless. I am not sure if it will be mandated though.

4. Comreg are probably going to ignore the Cable operators in this USO round.

5. If they can haggle the 3 operators major mentioned into a USO deal, apportioning the burden equitably across the operators with SMP, then the USO will last 3 years and maybe as much as 5 . During that time increases in Line rental will be tied to specific performance. If Eircom are being assh0les about removing pairgains from lines etc etc then Comreg will be loath to award them further increases in line rentals during the 3 - 5 year period. Hence the front loading tactic.

6 Eircom will be allowed to reduce the number of public phoneboxes by about 40% over the next 3 - 5 years.

There are other rumours coming out about the USO negotiations, I will post anon .

M

biker

just browsed through some press releases from eircom to find previous line rental increases:

cost of line in March 2000: £12.39 (EUR15.73)
increase in April 2000 to £13.21 (EUR 16.77)
increase in April 2001 to £14.25 (EUR18.09) (Note VAT @ 20%)
increase in April 2002 to EUR19.60
increase in Feb 2003 to EUR 21.15
increase in June 2003 to EUR22.50

THAT'S A WHOPPING 43% IN JUST OVER 3 YEARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

grr%#2ç&*".....

zz03

Originally posted by dahamsta
In the past, on occasion, Eircom has "solved" the margin squeeze problem by /raising/ the retail price, which Etain Doyle has found perfectly acceptable in her wisdom. I wonder if that's what's going on here?

While I have suspected the “margin squeeze price increase” in the past, it could be argued that there is no margin squeeze taking place in delegating the billing function. Up to now, anyone using an ESAT BT just paid for their calls. There was no monthly fee.

When it comes to ESAT BT issuing a single bill for calls and the access line subscription, they are only acting as a Visa or MasterCard type billing agency for eircom. The going rate for credit card services is about 2% of the sum billed.

In any other countries that I know of that have single billing, the incumbent continues to do the billing for all carriers. This allows each subscriber to shop around across the full range of carriers without having to deal with half a dozen monthly phone bills from different sources.

If telco X has a 1c per minute special offer for calls to the USA, you dial the carrier selection code for x (13xxx) and your number in the US and eircom bill you for the call. You might find carrier Y cheaper for calls to Spain and carrier Z cheaper for calls to mobiles. You can get automated diallers that store all tariffs for all suppliers (updatable by download) and incorporate time of day and day of week in their decision making. More advanced options are available for PABX setups.

It would be far better to allow eircom to do all the billing and give people a call by call choice. One of the reasons why competition was slow to take off in Ireland was the shortage of capacity that OLOs had into the eircom network. Consumers signed up for a new default carrier and they ended up with congestion tones because that carrier (for whatever reason!!!) couldn’t process their call at that moment. Allowing customers to shop around with eircom doing the billing would also get rid of this problem.

This is one of the reasons why European and international calls from Ireland remain about four or five times as costly out of Ireland than out of places in mainland Europe.

ComReg seem to be nothing more than an industry clearinghouse. Do they ever pay more than lip service to the consumers' or the national interest?

zz..