Broadband
Living in the centre of Limerick City one would assume that the broadband options should be endless but unfortunately they’re not. Living in an apartment without access to the roof and without permission for mounting aerials on the side of the building the options become limited quite quickly. Irish Broadband and Digiweb have some quite fast and reasonable wireless options however without access to somewhere to mount the aerial these are alas not suitable.
Currently there isn’t a phone line installed in the flat so getting the broadband from Eircom is going to be a very expensive option. It’s actually shockingly expensive for what you get considering that I only want the broadband and not the phone service (we all have mobiles for that)
That leaves my favourite Cable company Chorus. I currently have Chorus digital tv and it’s fine. There’s been 2 price hikes in 6 months but the service is fine. I’ve been ringing them looking for broadband for more than a year now. Each time I ring them I’m told that broadband is currently not available at my (city centre) address but I will be notified when it is available. Then in November I got a flyer through the door saying “Broadband is now available in your area” I though great so I rang Chorus. Alas it wasn’t to be, no broadband at my address. Then a month later a nice man called to the door to tell me that chorus braodband was available however it turned out that it wasn’t to be. Then a couple of weeks ago I got this Letter from Chorus. I wasn’t getting my hopes up so it took me until today to give them a ring, and sit and listen again to the patronising hold music and the recording telling me that the reason I was holding for so long was that chorus had so many great products and that the lines were buisier than usual. What complete shit! After 10 mins of listening to this I then had a very nice man explain to me slowly and clearly for the second time because I obviously wasn’t getting it, that broadband wasn’t available at my address. He then subtly mentioned that he noticed from the call history that I had called multiple times before. He did apologise about the letter I got and explained that it was just a mass mailing and all the letters sent said the same thing whether all the services listed were available or not. To be honest I think he was just trying to get me off the phone as it was just hitting 5.30 and he probably wanted to go home.
I’m sure Chorus will make broadband available at some stage. But until then I’ll have to suffer on with Ripwave which is really really shit. It’s so shit that I’m now posting through my mobile phone as the bloody thing is down again. Thank God for 100MB data option for €5.99 from three. I think I may have to upgrade to the 250MB or the unlimited option. It’s a bit slow and flaky but nowhere near as bad as Ripwave. The mobile broadband isn’t suitable for running a network behind, and is too laggy and bursty for any realtime applications.
I see Mulley is back on the broadband bandwagon again. Roll on.
In the UK they seem to be complaining about Fibre to the home and this is in a country which is actively roling out ADSL2 and VDSL where we can’t even roll out broadband 1.0.