Broadband Providers Comparison (1 Viewer)

[Donkey OJ]

just found out my area is finally broadband enabled. yay. cos dialup is *really* difficult to get used to after sitting at the end of a 4meg pipe for as long as i can remember.
just wondering has anyone any recommendations re a provider.
eircom - 2 month free trial, installation fee waived, €40 per month thereafter with a 12 month lock in.
esat - 3 month free trial, installation fee waived, €39 per month thereafter with a 12 month lock in.

based on the above esat is marginally cheaper. has anyone had experience of customer service problems or hardware (modem / router) issues with either provider which would sway me either way. i've worked with eircom in the past and found them to be generally incompetent. so i'd be leaning towards esat unless anyone has had any really bad experiences with them which would put me off. or if anyone has any alternatives to eircom or esat that are worth considering i'd be happy to hear them......

 

[Ex-User (250)]

eircom don't do customer service, end of story.

 

[Dizzywizard]

irish broadband and utv internet are two more options which are worth checking out.........

 

[egg_]

Took me three attempts to order broadband from esat - each time my order got lost somewhere - so chase up the order to make sure it's gone through
Apart from that no problems. They allow you to switch back to dialup at any time, which is handy if you move house

 

[Napalm]

Me got NTL, don't consider trying to run a win98/me box off it via USB, they give you wrong drivers and customer service is shite. its been up and down the last couple of days as well, but it does go like a beast 99% of the time even on the 300kps package.

 

[pete]

irish broadband and utv internet are two more options which are worth checking out.........

i've a 1mb, synchronous, 8:1 contention irishbroadband wireless connection which costs me 48.40 a month. winner.

 

[pete]

eircom don't do customer service, end of story.

... & ESAT's billing / accounts dept is a joke.

 

[Theseus Mock]

... & ESAT's billing / accounts dept is a joke.

add to that a shoddy service by Irish Broadband who are now requesting my MAC address (after an entire week of "it doesn't work" phone calls) cause my fucking Ripwave unit doesn't allocate any IPs.

 

[LMD64]

ok, so i won't go for the ripwave jobby

 

[pete]

from what i hear, ripwave is graaannd for your casual user type, or if you're not in a DSL area / NTL haven't upgraded your cable / have no LOS to an IBB mast

other than that i'd pass on it

 

[Donkey OJ]

i've a 1mb, synchronous, 8:1 contention irishbroadband wireless connection which costs me 48.40 a month. winner.

mmm i like the smell off that. i'll look them up but i reckon they dont got a base station anywhere near the sticks. thanks for the info guys.

 

[Donkey OJ]

just got broadband up and running and thought i'd report back. went with esat (iol broadband) in the end cos you get an extra month free (3 months free if you dont take them up on the offer, 4 months free if you do). took about 2 weeks from initial phonecall to being able to load up a webpage. i made sure to ring them intermittently over the 2 weeks to make sure they were progressing the order. 3 or 4 days ago we lost our phoneline for a full 24hours. an esat engineer had reconfigured our line to carry broadband at the exchange and fucked something up. 24hours without internet while looking for a job is a major pain in the hole.

anyway. the modem arrived yesterday but i needed an extra long crossover cable cos the phone jack and my PC are not very "adjacent". setup went relatively well 'cept for when i tried to be clever and locked myself out of the webadmin page on the modem. a glance thru the modem's documentation showed me how to do a reset (quite an involved process!). everything went well until the very end where the modem runs a self test to check all LAN/WAN connectivity. It failed on the authentication step so as much as i didn't want to, i had to get on to esat tech support to reset my (previously provided username & passwd. JAYSIS! 4 phonecalls later having being routed and rerouted all over the shop I eventually took my place in the tech support queue. 35 mins later i got onto a piece of wetware called stephen who reset my passwd and off i went.

relatively painless. broadband rocks. but stay away from tech support phone queues at peak times like sat afternoon.

firefox seems way faster (speshly loading images) than IE for some reason.

i feel like i've been promoted from a hairdresser driving a 13 year old Mini Metro to Ayrton Senna just before he crashed. International notoriety awaits.

 

[pete]

just pray you never have to do anything slightly out of the ordinary with ESAT BT's billing department, such as

• look for a bill
• find out what they think they're billing you for
• get them to respond to your correspondence querying various final demands for sums you have never actually been billed for and which don't even say what service you owe them for

they're a fucking joke. not a particularly funny one, mind, as they're currently threatening to take me to court.

 

[Stan Bowles]

UTV seems pretty good at the moment. Pretty simple to set up, quick as I need it to be. Only problem was getting me the modem originally as someone signed for it and kept it, when this was found out they sent another one out the next day. And then another one the day after that. Doh.

But as far as the connection goes, it seems pretty good to me, don't know about compression ratio etc, but I'm flying along the interweb.

Oh yeah and cheaper than esat or eircom at 30 euro a month.

 

[admin]

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp

try that

 

[Donkey OJ]

just pray you never have to do anything slightly out of the ordinary with ESAT BT's billing department, such as

• look for a bill
• find out what they think they're billing you for
• get them to respond to your correspondence querying various final demands for sums you have never actually been billed for and which don't even say what service you owe them for

they're a fucking joke. not a particularly funny one, mind, as they're currently threatening to take me to court.

you've got me worried now..... the only way they'd sign you up was if you agreed to pay via direct debit. i normally give direct debits a very wide berth but i had no choice. this thing is a trial for 3 months so we'll see are there any fuckups in the meantime. i'll think long and hard before i lock myself into a 12 month contract. do UTV have that 12 month lockin thing going on aswell?

 

[THRILLHO]

they're a fucking joke. not a particularly funny one, mind, as they're currently threatening to take me to court.

Esat also sent debt collectors after me for a month-old bill for EUR120. After paying the debt collectors, I get more threatening phone calls to say the debt collectors didn't receive my payment and that they were about to begin legal proceedings.

Had to send them a copy of my statement, highlighting where I paid them before they backed off.

All this over a month-old bill. Wankers.

 

[admin]

Esat also sent debt collectors after me for a month-old bill for EUR120. After paying the debt collectors, I get more threatening phone calls to say the debt collectors didn't receive my payment and that they were about to begin legal proceedings.

Had to send them a copy of my statement, highlighting where I paid them before they backed off.

All this over a month-old bill. Wankers.

if they'd sent me an actual bill before sending me a reminder and a final demand withing 3 days of each other it wouldn't be so bad.

I don't know what they're billing me for - and neither do they, apparently.

 

[IFF]

y family's broadband provider is Net1 and they are good

 

[eoinbox]

quick question - we're not in an ntl 'area' ( cunts, it appears ntl and chorus have divided dublin up into territories, westies stylee, which i thought would be against some competition guidelines but hey!) and chorus seems worse than utv, which looks good and seems to get good reviews on tumped. buh, do you have to switch phone company to that utv talk thing if you get utv broadband?