Rate my ISP

For some reason the people who try leave multiple reviews under different guises always have terrible grammar and worse punctuation. It’s a much bigger giveaway than their ip address. Seems Vodafone just can’t get the staff these days.

carol lawlor
95.45.252.58
“its fine cant give out about it”

antone eright
95.45.252.58
“all good for what i pay”

damian doddy
95.45.252.58
“i,am from cork .i got 24mb just came out iam like a pig in s### .”

brenda
95.45.252.58
“on 3mb offpeak 35 pm happy out and my bills are staying at that prices .the rep that call to my door said 35 i said no way. i was paying 52 with eircom”

michael
95.45.252.58
“not bad at all”

igor
95.45.252.58
“value for money its good speed is ok not as good as back home but fine for ireland”

mary leen
95.45.252.58
“the best speed i ever got and i,am saving alot of money”

tom
95.45.252.58
“i fine vodafone very gud have 7mb geting 5.5 day time nite time 6.4 .gaming very good .get that for 42 eicom 67 my 4 mothers have it too all fine it very good”

ricky
95.45.252.58
“35 eur for 3mb very good 2.6 .iwas with eircom lift them 10 weeks ago because singapore telcom took them over customer service in inda”

ricky
95.45.252.58
“eircom a joke speed is gone down since singapore telcom took over eircom .vvvvvvery bad .customerservice inda joke. with vodafone now 35 eur pm.3mb cant go wrong”

There’s a lot of very unhappy Smart  Telecom customers giving out about a new cap that apparently isn’t very transparent and is actually being touted as unlimited. Recent ratings here have made them drop from a close second to 3rd place over the last few days.

sifromLucan says

“I am with Smart for the last few years and I had nothing but good things to say about them. I would have given 5 stars for all areas, that is until this week. Digiweb have taken over and already broken the Unlimited download agreement I signed up for. The shut off everyones broadband because of high usage and have now upset all their customers. They now have a cap of 170GB a month which is not value compared to someone like UPC 270GB a month and for less money and faster speeds.

Well I will be canceling my service as soon as UPC install my new broadband and I know of loads of people doing the same. Its a shame since they were the best broadband in Ireland and their customers knew and raved about them so much. As for digiweb, pfff, I wouldn’t touch them if they offered free broadband. Eircom resellers tend to be totally crap and they are the worst of a bad bunch.”

There is much discussion over at the Smarttelecom forums, and a small campaign to leave ratings on ratemyisp but one member on this thread thinks “Not really a good method to complain its just rankings and can be easilly manipulated.” But that’s not true and may even be missing the point of this site. A campaign to get people to leave bad ratings is not manipulating anything, I have deleted and blocked reviewers pretending to be several different people before, but I’ve only seen authentic ratings from unhappy smart customers in the last few days. And that’s exactly what this site is for, as well as good reviews from happy customers.

Smart has recently been taken over by Digiweb. Just as Vodafone has recently taken over BT. I can’t merge ratings, so I guess I’ll just have to see if Smart continues to trade under that name. But I suppose I’ll eventually delete BT which is oddly enough in 2nd place at the moment.

http://www.eircombay.com/ provides a workaround for Eircom’s ban on pirate bay.

Our internet providers shouldn’t decide what we can and can’t access. Yet, Eircom agreed—without legal contest—to block access to thepiratebay.org at the request of the music industry. Luckily, their methods of blocking access are juvenile.

Eek! I thought things had gotten quiet around here but it turned out I had my “Notify me when a comment is held for moderation” turned off. So I didn’t realise there were quite a few reviews/ratings being held for moderation for a couple of weeks. Sorry! All published now.

*****

The order of the top 3 is still the same though:

1. Smart Telecom
2. Magnet
3. BT

There’s still definitely more people wading in to leave comments about bad service they’ve received. Great - but don’t forget to give praise where it’s due too. If you’ve left a bad review, don’t forget to come back and leave a good one when you find a better service. They matter too.

*****

There’s a good post over on the Save a few bob blog about weighing up your options for Broadband.

*****

Alan left a useful comment on the previous blog post. To summarise, a broadband site comparing results from http://www.irishisptest.com/ would be much more technically accurate, but I think think factors like customer service are very impoortant too.

There was a broadband speed surve done in the UK recently, the largest of it’s kind see:Broadband rates ‘not up to speed’.

I set this site up for two reasons. One - it seemed really obvious that it would be useful - I was surprised it hadn’t been done before. But I also decided I was going to choose my next ISP based on reviews here. I waited for 100 reviews and then chose who was top of the list, which was Magnet. They’ve just recently been overtaken in the number one spot by Smart Telecom, when a review for Magnet didn’t quite have 5 stars all round.

To be honest, when (top technology blogger!) Justin mason left a glowing review of Magnet, that was the real clincher. I still haven’t left a review of Magnet. Service has been really really good, and no comparison to Eircom (surprise surprise) but it hasn’t been perfect. There have been a few dropouts and for some reason lots of trouble connecting on Mac some days but I’ll wait a bit longer before giving full review. Let’s see how long Smart can hold the top spot.

So I added a blog, this is the first post. I’d always intended for rate my ISP to be self maintaining / user generated. And I’m far from an expert on ISP’s, so I didn’t think there’d be much point in adding a blog. But I thought it’d be nice to have somewhere to make the odd announcement about the site. (Incidentally the ratings system is a Wordpress blog; each ISP is a blog post / the reviews are just comments with ratings.)

ANYWAY - there are times, like today, when I find myself  wishing there was a blog on the site for the sole purpose of naming and shaming companies who try to cheat. do you know it’s actually illegal for a company to pose as a member of the public on  a site like this? It’s happened a couple of times now.

Today someone left a glowing review of their ISP (one currently at the bottom of our chart ). And they left bad reviews of everyone else. And they were all left a minute after each other, all from the same IP address,  and all with the kind of sloppy punctuation people tend to use when they’ve written several fake reviews in a row. All deleted now.

I will be naming and shaming the company next time.