[ILUG] [OT] Eircom and broadband woes

[Niall O Broin]

On 18 Nov 2004, at 12:54, Keith Hyland wrote:

> My line failed the DSL test, no ammount of cajoling, pleading and 
> ranting would persuade Eircom to to tell me what the nature of the 
> failure was....
> Time to call Irish Broadband, who strung me along for a few months, 
> and eventually backed out, citing a "tree" in the path.
> So i disconnected all my phones in the house, passed the DSL test and 
> got connected.

A friend of mine's line PASSED the test but wouldn't work when the kit 
was delivered - the router couldn't train to the DSLAM. Turned out that 
his house had 4 (or maybe even 5) Eircom modular jacks, of which at 
least 2 were masters, and these jacks were not connected in the correct 
daisy chain manner.

Luckily, the incompetent Eircom installer (who installed the various 
jacks over time as a nixer) had used cables which made it possible to 
rewire the house correctly, at which stage, it worked.

Point being here that this line was NOT compatible with DSL (because of 
screwed up CPE) but yet it passed the test.

I have heard from Someone Who Should Know that because Eircom is trying 
hard to ramp up its number of DSL subscribers, they are now declaring 
as passed lines which might be marginal, and this is leading to 
problems when people get their self install kit which doesn't work.


Niall