On 12 January, I ordered a simple phone and broadband package as we moved back in to my wife’s old family home on the Meath-Cavan border – the one known to Irish Country Living readers since the “Operation Renovation” series of articles.

From the outset, everything went amiss. Eircom endlessly recorded the wrong type and price of package on my contract, then bounced my case back and forth with its subcontractor KN Networks for two whole months – disconnecting my neighbours in the process.

At the end of March, it begrudgingly carried out the works needed, as described by the first engineer who had visited us.

Things slowly began to move only after I lodged a formal complaint with the regulatory agency ComReg.

Some of Eircom’s answers were surreal. I couldn’t talk to the person dealing with my complaint “because we don’t have a phone number for him”, yet I was given a number to contact KN myself because Eircom staff “couldn’t call them”.

As I largely work from home, I tried to contact Eircom’s business division. No one picked up the phone or returned my messages.

While fighting my case through internet forums, I got in touch with 34-year-old Damien McArdle, who lives not far from me on the Cavan-Longford border. He too had ordered a broadband package in January, when he went back to study for a master’s in project management with online lectures.

A nightmare

“It’s been three months of a nightmare with Eircom,” said Damien, who never received any service, but had €70 debited from his account – until the company offered to downgrade his connection to a lower speed.

“I said that was fine if it was reliable, but they would have tied me into a new 12-month contract and charged a €30 change fee. I said no way,” Damien told me. Instead, he stays late after work to follow the lectures from his office.

Another customer asked on the popular web forum Boards.ie if Eircom could fix the short wiring between his house and the nearest pole because he wasn’t getting the same broadband service as his immediate neighbours. The company ended the discussion by replying: “As there is a line in place, Eircom will not install a new line for broadband service or speed.” The customer wrote back: “I believe that I’m being brushed aside due to the fact I’m living in a rural area.”

He and Damien were only asking Eircom to give them whatever was available in their area – and we’re not talking about isolated places where broadband is plainly unavailable. I live only three miles from the nearest town and I now have a good enough connection for regular home and office use. It looks like those of us who need boots on the ground for a few hours to get online have slipped to the bottom of Eircom’s priority list.

You might argue that I could have just ordered a connection from a competitor such as Sky or Vodafone. But there is no real competition on the historic, Eircom-owned copper wire telephone network. All alternative operators require you to have an existing Eircom contract, and once you transfer it to them most of your line rental fee goes back to Eircom.

A handful of companies have rolled out their own network all the way to customers’ buildings, such as UPC in cities or wireless operators in very isolated areas – but none of them offer affordable options where I live.

In fairness to Eircom, regulations forbid it from charging a customer for the cost of connecting their home unless it is over €7,000. This gives the company no incentive to reach rural dwellers and ComReg says this threshold is now under review.

Eircom blames the weather

Under its subsidised universal service obligation to provide telecommunications across the country, though, Eircom faces penalties if it doesn’t install or fix phone lines within reasonable time frames. According to ComReg, those penalties skyrocketed from €80,000 two years ago to €2.5m in 2014.

The company tried to blame last year’s hurricane winds, but that didn’t fly. And although Eircom declined to give me data comparing its performance in rural and urban areas, it acknowledged that “anecdotally, there may be reasons why any install and/or repair in rural Ireland takes longer than in a city or town”.

The density of existing infrastructure as well as exposure to weather conditions were among the justifications given.

Eircom’s director of corporate affairs Paul Bradley told me: “There is no conspiracy against rural customers, but your journey highlights a number of processes that have failed and we’ve been changing them.”

Bradley added that Eircom was now focused on retaining customers who have been leaving the company because of poor service and said: “At our last management conference in February, we had a customer who had a bad experience at each table.”

But he also acknowledged that the company’s priority was now the next-generation network.

“It does not make sense to go back and try to retrofit high-speed broadband on the existing network,” Bradley said.

Yet for the moment, this is what we’re stuck with.

This series will continue in next week’s Irish Country Living.

Eircom trouble dos and don’ts

  • • If you’re having difficulty getting a line installed or fixed by Eircom, write to them publicly on Twitter @eircom or through the dedicated forum on Boards.ie (http://www.boards.ie/ttforum/1293). No need to contact them by phone – you will just waste hours and nothing will happen.
  • • After 10 days, ComReg’s Consumer Line service can support your complaint. Contact them by phone on 01-804-9668 or 1890-229-668, or by email at consumerline@comreg.ie.
  • • Refuse to deal with subcontractors – Eircom must honour their contract themselves.
  • • If your fault is not solved within 10 working days, you are entitled to a statutory refund worth two months’ line rental – haggle for more if it lasts longer.