I say "on it's way", because I have been hurt before and am still finding it hard to trust any broadband provider.

You will remember an earlier post about getting broadband from eircom. This is the second stage of that.

After my raging rant from before, Luke put me in touch with a nice gentleman in eircom. He will remain unnamed as if I were to name him, he may get barraged with emails. He checked out my line with a little more conviction than [mary] on the phone last time. He said that it was capable and forced the line to pass. Yay! One question tho. Refer back to the earlier conversation with [mary].

"I SEE, AND WILL I EVER GET IT?", "NO".

"EVER?", "NO".

"LIKE, FOREVER?" "NO, BUT YOU CAN RING PEOPLE, AND ASK THEM TO DOWNLOAD YOUR PORN FOR YOU!".

So, what's going on then? Well, I'm not sure. But it would be nice to have this service on a public front, like an escalation system. If I'm not happy with the first line service i'm getting from the sales rep, I should be able to talk to a more senior technical person and they can look into the issue in more detail. Just a thought. Eircom, I hope you're listening.

Anyway, moving on from that, eircom are pretty much the worst value for broadband and phone services in Ireland at the moment, and my original plan was to move to EsatBT who provide a much better service at a cheaper price. But as mentioned before you still have to connect to eircom first before going to any other provider. This intial connection cost a total of €145 (€110 connection charge + 1 Month line rental).

I called EsatBT today and have ordered 1Mb Broadband and Talk. Blackie has 2Mb and says that it is more than he needs so I'm going with 1Mb for €35/month incl. tax. There is a €45 charge for the Wireless Modem and free connection, so it's a pretty sweet deal.

But the total cost so far for Broadband in ireland for is €145 + €70 = €215 just to get connected. And timewise, at least 2 months. I'm still trying to find where the government is getting off saying we are a broadband enabled nation.

Some Related news on Broadband penetration in ireland: Ireland Lags in broadband league, Govt. urged to fund broadband, Eircom on target in 2004 (I think not), Broadband Initiative for Rural Areas, Ireland drops one place in broadband league.

BTW there are people to go to if you are not happy with what you're get from a tech provider. ComReg will listen to all of these kind of issues and you can get all your money back from some providers just by mentioning comreg in a letter/email.