Eircom Broadband 11 hour downtime. What exactly am I paying for?
Posted on January 13, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork, Ireland, Technology.
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]
6 Replies to "Eircom Broadband 11 hour downtime. What exactly am I paying for?"
conor on January 13, 2006
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.
Donal on January 13, 2006
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.
Branedy on January 13, 2006
I have BT and it was down also this morning, but it came back up shortly after we call them. A lot better service.
Laura on September 12, 2007
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?)
conor on September 12, 2007
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.
Liz on January 13, 2006
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.