Few useful words for Network Operations in Eircom: Active/Passive Clusters, RAID, RAC, Multi-Pathing, Redundancy, 24*7*365 Network Monitoring, investment, SLA.
€33 per month ex-VAT for this? Next time Eircom, maybe don’t double the download speed, just halve the price.
This wasn’t just me, this was, in their words, “the Cork region”. Can anyone who has business broadband with Eircom in Cork confirm if they were down from midnight to 11.30am this morning? Are you going to sue?
Of course, we’ll all be refunded the half-day downtime on our bill. Oh maybe not, it might affect the price they are acquired at by the latest suitor who sees an effective monopoly making shed-loads of money for old rope.
[tags]eircom, cowboys, service, monopoly[/tags]
January 13, 2006 at 12:55 pm
I was babysitting at my daughter’s last night, her broadband went down just before midnihgt, when I got home mine was down too. I rang eircom this morning around 10.30am, I finally got through that voice activated software (which has real difficulties with my accent) to a real human being, gave my account number, and hey presto I was up! It’s gone down another couple of times since, but fingers crossed it’s been reliably up now for the last half hour. I’m a home customer, as is my daughter, not business. And yeah, it’s about time they brought the price down big time. Ridiculous.
January 13, 2006 at 1:38 pm
You did better than me. I asked for an ETA for recovery at 9.30 and was told they had no idea.
If I was paying maybe €10 per month for this or was getting 8 MBs for at the current price I’d copmplain less. But at the minute I am being simultaneously gouged and given third world service. It makes my blood boil. We have had plenty of other outages over the past year of shorter duration and not one word of apology or explanation or refund from eircom.
Compare this to Powweb in the US who I use as a web-host. They have too many problems for my liking but I always know exactly what is going on, what the problem is and a good sense of how long it’ll take to fix. All this from a discount provider.
And if one more new broadband provider does blanket advertising across all media sources and I later discover that they offer service in Dublin and Cork cities only, I’m gonna explode.
January 13, 2006 at 1:56 pm
That sounds really crap! What I can’t get over is the price of Eircom, I knew it was bad but as they aren’t/weren’t available when I was looking into getting broadband I went with the only available provider, Smart. I’m living 3 miles from Cork City and only one provider (eventually) of broadband. While I had loads of problems getting it up and running, it’s working well now. And the price is much more competitive.
Eircom couldn’t tell me when our exchange would be upgraded, just that all exchanges should be ready by the end of 2006. This was during the summer of 2005 so I wasn’t going to hang around.
January 13, 2006 at 5:37 pm
I have BT and it was down also this morning, but it came back up shortly after we call them. A lot better service.
September 12, 2007 at 2:08 pm
You’re not alone here. My employer supplies me with eircom DSL and after 2 years of zero outages from BT and Imagine I have had at least 4 significant (20 minute plus) outages in less than 3 months. The first one occured when I was (ironically) working on a client problem that needed to be solved within a tight 2 hr SLA. Ironic when my DSL provider just goes up and down as they feel like it. Other colleagues have faced outages of several days and had to drive into the office to work out of hours which entirely contradicts the entire purpose of having the service in the first place.
For a start I never experienced this with BT or Imagine, so whatever is happening appears to be happening on the eircom network? (Or are other providers being impacted?)
September 12, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Actually we moved to BT and have regretted it. Far more downtime and glitches than Eircom.
If Eircom does suffer an outage in your area, you can be pretty sure everyone else will too as they all use the Eircom network.
July 6, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Eircom broadband was down last night for me, it’s down again tonight, I’ll be lucky actually if this posts. I will be ringing them in the morning to get an answer and to inform them I want a refund. Paying for a service and not receiving it is fraud in my book.
July 6, 2009 at 10:49 pm
This last outage my be some form of DNS issue, if you set your systems up to use other DNS servers the issues may go away, try these two DNS servers 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222
July 7, 2009 at 8:25 am
Totally agree about using OpenDNS. Rock solid for me for several years now. Instructions on how to set it up on your PC here: https://www.opendns.com/start/computer/
We upgraded to Eircom 7Mbs but the line is so crappy we never connect at more than 6 and get a lot of disconnects. Have to power cycle the router when that happens since it always reconnects by default at 2 or 3 MBs instead. It’ll probably be 2052 before Eircom improve the lines out to Old Chapel.
July 7, 2009 at 10:26 am
Agreed, I’m seeing appalling levels of service at the moment, I seem to keep losing the dynamic DNS. Its awful, its like being back on dial up.
July 7, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Have also been having the same issues with Eircom Broadband (Waterford area) both yesterday 06/07/09 and again today 07/07/09. The eircom.net website which I eventually got onto has a bland service message saying they are having issues due to volume of usage/traffic and are working on sorting out issues. Great help that is… when will it be fixed – we are paying for this.
July 14, 2009 at 2:50 am
13th July 2009 Eircom no Broadband Service.
Eircom went laa-laa today,… We had no service at all. It was a first for me with them, I have a 3mb dsl line and it stopped today for the first time in 3 years.
We rang their ‘special’ support line and were told – BY A FOOKING ANSWER MACHINE – “Thank You… Blah, Blah, – You may be experiencing problems in your area…. (Jesus Christ on a Stick, machines are sooooo clever these days)
Eircom’s “Support-o-Matic-Answer-System” played the same ‘Answer’ each and every time you called in (and here’s the good bit) NO MATTER WHERE IN IRELAND YOU CALLED IN FROM.
I had calls to my phone from people who I have set networks up for in the past… Cork, Sligo. Boyle, Dublin (all over) – all them in the space of 3 hours…. (approx 20 calls)
Seems like Eircom got a lickin’ from something they didnt expect … though 10 out’a 10 (ish) to them as they are back up and ‘serving’ after 6 hours give or take (to my knowledge)
[end rant]
Stevo
July 14, 2009 at 9:39 am
I find eircom’s broadband service less than acceptable. This latest issue doesn’t surprise me at all. The eircom spokesperson, on RTE1 radio this morning was blase and non-technical….an insult to the public.
July 14, 2009 at 10:24 am
Eircom’s “explanation” is a flat lie and patronizing rubbish. If there was a genuine DOS attack, NOTHING would work as their network would be completely saturated, but since changing to an open DNS server fixes the problem its clear that the problem is with their DNS servers themselves. If there was an attack by “hackers” it would be impossible to use an external server due to a saturated network (DOS attacks basically overloads the network with messages preventing any traffic from crossing anywhere). The fact that changing DNS server is acting as a workaround to me would suggest that their DNS servers are failing, more than likely due to age/disk space problems or a corrupt database.
July 14, 2009 at 10:25 am
I’ll bet that Eircom ISP now has more people working in Marketing than Tech.
July 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Actually Laura, you can have, and most are, service level DOS attacks. An HTTP (port 80), SSH (22) telnet (23), etc. In this case DNS, port 53, could have been under a DOS, or their Bind server, the other name for DNS, could have been corrupted, either by accident, or deliberate actions. The internet, really does NOT operate on ‘names’ but numbers. The original bind/DNS (names to numbers) was written (badly) by a grad student. It has been a kluge ever since!
July 14, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I agree there could easily be an attack on a port, but if there was an attack on port 53 (DNS port) no DNS traffic could get in or out of the network, which to me would suggest that anybody on the eircom LAN would be equally unable to access DNS servers externally as well an internally.
April 9, 2010 at 10:37 pm
I get worse than dial-up speeds lately…. and when I ring i get put onto a robot which I have learned to roar at to get through to tech support. They just send on new cheap routers…. I use Googles publicDNS from time to time on my Laptop which improves things… But I dont mess with other peoples laptops in the house. Not that they try connect anymore.
Their E-mail service is even more temperamental. I switched to Gmail, and send on the spam to the eircom.net address… It seems to be all that eircom is good for.
April 10, 2010 at 2:26 pm
This is why I now have this as a backup for when Eircom goes to hell every single evening:
http://qik.com/video/5974365