Unfortunately the utility of connectivity was limited to either my morning commute ( Laytown is the second station so I used to get a seat ) or out of rush hour train journeys. Getting on the Drogheda train any time even remotely near rush hour means standing for 50 minutess and even holding a cute little mini notebook, connected or not, would be impractical

These days I stick to my blackberry which has excellent email coverage, flat rate data and while it’s a bit too slow for browsing is quite nifty at pulling down RSS feeds and reading while standing.

I agree with Daragh that rather than spending a fortune on adding wireless to trains, avoid the journey completely by developing the satellite hubs to enable telecommuting or even better still encourage decentralized ( no smart comments !) investment and job creation.

It is a bit frightening that a bloodbank can just give your medical information to another bloodbank. And now all medical testing results of 171.000 donors are roaming out there including private addresses and telephone numbers.

As you can imagine I wasn’t happy and asked why I had to pay an extra €500, turns out that this extra €500 is commission that the sales department at Dell will receive. According to the guy in the finance company I’m not the only person that has been ringing about this and that he was sick of this happening and told me to ring Dell themselves to try sort something out.

So I rang Dell customer service, after been panned off from person to person (5 in total) I end up talking to the most unhelpful, lying person you could ever get. I asked him about this commission and was told there was no such thing in place, so I asked to speak to his supervisor, he wouldn’t get him, “I’ll get him to call you” he said. So I said I would wait on the line until I got speaking to him to which I’m told he would not get him.
This went on for a bit so I read him my rights, he then tells me to ring the finance company as it’s out of their hands and nothing to do with them. It was obvious he didn’t want to speak to me. In the end I managed to get him to ring the finance company with me still on the line.

I told the person in the finance department the whole story, he then talked to the guy from Dell saying that are sick of this stunt going on and asked him why he told me this commission didn’t exist, why I was lied too and asked why he would not let me speak to his supervisor. This then turned into a row between the two of them, I’m there still on the line listening to this thinking to myself what sort of a business is Dell running.
It ends up the guy from Dell hung up and the guy in the finance department suggest I take it further, so I did, I went and rang the NCA (National Consumer Agency).

So it’s now in the hands of the NCA and there not impressed one bit and neither am I.

…could it be…
….might it be…
….possibly…

do I dare hold my breath? Could they be upgrading the exchange?

I think I was unfair to 3’s Punchestown’s network yesterday as looking at the modem spec for the phone in question it’s only capable of a max download of 384kbps.

Tom

Today, Tuesday (after the last of the Oxegenators had gone home), took the 3 phone and laptop to Punchestown where there’s a strong 3G signal. Managed to connect with download speeds around the 300 mark and uploads at 50Kbps. So, five time faster than ISDN for browsing, a little slower for uploads; but broadband it ain’t!!

Tom

As you said, why build up peoples’ hope…

Tom

I’m less than 100 metres from an exchange that was supposed to be upgraded in Sept 2007. I don’t even have ISDN available in the exchange (because it is due to go Broadband apparently). The village I live in has the distinction of having the lowest broadband penetration in the country (according to the CSO). The Dept of the Environment have an advance office less than 10 minutes walk from my house.

Competition is marvellous, but unfortunately many semi-rural areas are left struggling with just one provider. Solutions that fail due to “wrong type of rain” or “usage on a day of week with a ‘Y’ in it” are only workable for people if there is appropriate levels of customer support to wing it (such as immediately stopping billing if the service is out for more than a week).

Matters aren’t helped by coverage maps from providers that are wrong to the level of being a blatant lie. This works both ways… some providers maps show coverage where there isn’t and other are probably losing business by not having accurate or updated coverage maps. I’m peeved at the former camp and irritated by the latter.

The difficulty with getting planning permission for masts is also a challenge to the roll out of wireless services that is restricting coverage, from what I can see.

As soon as I get the rebate cheque from my ex-provider I’ll be touting around the one other provider in my area I haven’t gone with yet. Customer service, advance site survey, availability of other nodes to point to etc. will all be criteria in my decision.

Hope the weather changes for you soon Tom.

The appearance of a 2nd operator had two very positive effects; the sudden departure of a large percentage of disgruntled customers took a huge load of the existing network’s creaky infrastructure and, I’m guessing here, this sudden departure of paying customers prompted the original provider to send somebody in management on a Irish Times customer care course. The network still fails regularly (for the last few weeks, due to the “wrong type” of rain!) but at least customers can now get information on the fault and they also seem to have put engineers on-call at weekends. Competition, isn’t it marvellous?

Tom

Simon, I’m sure you’ve taken this as a lesson not to doubt the lessons of Saturday Morning TV… Knight Rider taught me that one man can make a difference, and apparently his missus can push it over the top into a victory.

What upsets me at the moment is the crushing silence on this issue from the opposition, not least as many of the recommendations of the Dail committee were handed to Dick Roche (aka Zap Brannigan) 2 years ago by Eamon Gilmore (when he passed on my initial analysis of the situation to the then Minister).

Oh hokey cokey cokey. ;(