Eircom, thou hast let me down
Saturday February 25, 2006
When your business relies heavily on a decent broadband connection (by decent, I’m using Eircom’s 3mb business line, though the upstream isn’t huge), its a pure pain in the ass when you have to spend the first part of your morning (about 40 minutes) waiting on hold before speaking to someone.
Actually, I never got to speak to anyone, it just kept going on and on. All I needed to know was if there was a line fault in the area. You contact an ISP I used to work for on tech support and the IVR system kicks in telling you theres a fault in your area to save you waiting on hold and yesterday I was informed they even send you text messages and keep you updated during the day!
So the broadband went.
We waited.
And waited.
By lunchtime I had to go home to send off print orders for jobs, check the mail and return to the office. Nothing by the afternoon.
So I resorted to dialup (56k - we pulled out the dual ISDN back in the summer to make way for BB) - borrowed a laptop (as I now refuse to install modems into any machines I build), found a length of spare phone cable I had and dialed in. 15 minutes to check my email, download a 250kb PDF and return to my office. The killer was, there was an error in the PDF so I had to ring to arrange another one to be sent as waiting on mail was going to be a joke - and fair play, they sent another one immediately, so I waited a further ten minutes (seen as the pages were cached it was running a little quicker) and got my updated PDF - which I then faxed away…. who the hell sends a fax any more?
Bottom line is, I have no idea how any Irish business could rely on dialup for their internet access and not make the move over to broadband. That and I can’t fathom the fact that one of the country’s leading ISP has to take more than 40 minutes to answer a tech support call to tell me whether or not it can be fixed or when the service goes live. Especially when every 3 minutes they tell you how important your call is!
Damn John for kicking my ass in Call of Duty for the last hour of the day!
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Switch to Netsource. They answer the phone almost immediately and actually ring you back
- and would you ever use a better captcha system please. The “6″ and the “8″ look almost identical due to the horizontal line
still at me about the captcha….
which means I still haven’t done anything about it, but yes!
for the sake of usability and sanity amongst readers!
Ken - I’ve no problem with captcha - it’s just your one that bugs me
Have a look at Justin Mason’s
Hey, what happened to the captcha? So much fun in confusing my 1s and 4s just evaporated!
hah
by the way, dump your broadband provider, unless they’re really really cheap. Or you have really grown to appreciate the joy that is dial-up… !real evil grin here!
played around with the PHP and removed the line, just for you
i’d have to consider it if it was going to carry on. it was still out yesterday in the office. i use a different provider for the home connection which has never had any difficulties - just wish i knew what was going on!
as for the captcha, i had to make it a little easier to read. even I was getting pissed off to an extent with the line there, sixes and eights, 1’s and 4’s
was this on a friday? cos it happened to us on friday. I rang them and basically what happened was their authorisation server got fried.. Dunno if it was friday though. All i know is it went off Thursday night about 2ish and wasnt on until saturday around 8…
It was thursday, friday, all day saturday - yet no real care for an explanation. Thank God for Chorus at home