DNG Farrell, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim – Named & Shamed.

Click below to read updates on this article:

UPDATE

DNG Farrell have consistently tried to regain control of the domain AuctionCentral.ie without paying me for it by changing the nameservers via the IEDR site. I’ve been changing them back so people see the original website I built for them complete with the non payment message I put up. Today however they got the IEDR on board to remove me as an admin for the domain! So now they will have got away with robbing me completely. I hope companies like this get what’s coming to them. I’m sure they will. I will be buying a house this year and I’m dammed if I’ll go near any of theirs. I will continue to tell anyone who cares how crappy a company DNG Farrell are.

A letter sent to me today from DNG Farrell. My responses in orange:

“19th October, 2009

Mr. Leon Quinn
Reverb Studios
Lisnagea
Drumsna
Carrick on Shannon
Co. Leitrim

Re Auction Central Website

Dear Mr. Quinn

I refer to the above and to previous correspondence.

I have spoken with Mr. Farrell regarding the background of this website and I have also had the opportunity of meeting with our Sales Manager, Celia Donohoe, who has been away from the office on maternity leave.

The position is as follows:

1) You were contacted by our office to build a website within a specific period of time.

Which I done and have proof of.

2) The website was not fully operational within the time frame promised by you. In addition, there appeared to be difficulties in the uploading of images and indeed, we had to consult a third party to source suitable images for inclusion on the Auction Central Site.

The client is always responsible for all content and images.

Quote from Ronnie Clarke 24/03/2009 – “We are sourcing the photos ourselves and hope to have something for you tomorrow”.

Quote from Celia Donohoe 25/03/2009 – “Will check on those stock photos and see what we can come up with.”

The site was up but awaiting content within the very short time frame given. Content was required from the advertisers on the site which had nothing to do with me. There was no fault with the image uploader but perhaps a lack of knowledge on how to use it. Full training was offered as I can prove.

3) You also proposed a link with “our site” and your father-in-laws site “Tully Services”. This was extremely inappropriate as his firm trades as a Boat Brokerage which would be in direct competition with our business.

My ‘proposal’ 24/03/2009 – How about a link to my father in law’s boating website too at www.tullyservices.com or would that be competition?

Ronnie Clarke’s response 24/03/2009 – “In principle no problem at all. However we are spending a lot on national advertising and would prefer not to.”

This was a simple question asked and responded to, no harm done. I thought it might have been to the benefit of both companies to partner up.

4) In light of your unhelpful and abrasive behavior we sourced an independent company to carry out an assessment of the site and its functionality and if it was capable of meeting all requirements.

If the site was functioning properly then obviously we would have no difficulty in paying for your service.

No one from your office ever said there was a problem with the site and that you weren’t paying me because of that. Please provide proof of this?

Contd/

However, prior to us carrying out this site examination you took our site down and posted the most defamatory and damaging remarks which has caused serious damage to our reputation.

To pen such comments and post on the web beggars belief and speaks volume of the integrity and professionalism of your firm.

I have many, many excellent testimonials from satisfied clients all visible on my website www.reverbstudios.ie and I have built a great reputation in recent years as an honest, fast and affordable service provider.

It is now clear that it is impossible to have any working relationship with you and we request that you immediately remove these defamatory remarks from the internet and that you issue an appropriate clarification which would require our prior approval.

Not only will I not be removing my remarks but I will be posting this document on the same article so that everyone can see how ****** your company really is. Feel free to take legal action. I am on the right side of the law.

We trust that you will take the appropriate steps to remedy this situation.

Yours sincerely

PS – This is the last communication I had with DNG Farrell after the site was complete and my invoice had been ignored:

Me 06/06/2009 – “Hello Liam, I’ve sent an invoice quite a while ago for the design of www.AuctionCentral.ie which has not been paid or responded to. Can you let me know your intentions please?

Liam’s response 09/06/2009 – “Hi Leon,

Thanks for your email, I’ll have a look at the invoice and will revert.

Regards,
Liam”

——————-

DNG Farrell”

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Future is Local, Co. Leitrim – Named & Shamed

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One day last year as we were trying to convince the executors to play ball I rang the solicitor handling the case and was told that I wasn’t his client and not to call again.  He was now working solely for the executors. Since I had no contact with them, I ended up in the dark as to how the application was progressing and today I finally learned through my own efforts that the initial application and subsequent appeal were unsuccessful and that this had been decided last year!

I had received no communication to tell me the result of the case from the solicitors, executors or repayment office. I was the sole beneficiary of my granny’s will and the solicitors fee would have come out of my pocket so this is not acceptable.

On a previous case I had to chase a different solicitor from the same office to get anything done.

Yet another solicitor from the office completed a full cost breakdown and submitted the bill to me for payment. With considerable difficulty, I managed to raise the funds to pay a huge bill and pay it all off in full only to be told by the solicitor that she had made a mistake and I needed to pay nearly a grand extra.

All this and they charge a large professional fee!?

Anthony Harris Solicitors, Crumlin Village, Dublin – Named & Shamed.

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• Showing people that I’m busy!
• Adding content to the Blog.
• Having an easily accessible Portfolio list.
• Promoting my client’s Websites.

As people may know, linking to a new site from an established one and especially one that has a bit of search engine traction like this blog, helps to get the new site into the search engines a bit quicker. Google in particular crawls this blog quite regularly and whatever links it sees, it follows. A lot of my sites are on the first page of google within weeks due to a combination of this and good domain choice.

Recently, I linked to a client’s site from here, same as usual and its caused all manner of problems and arguments and I’d like to warn other bloggers/designers of what could happen when you’re generous with your linking!

Basically, when the client googled his main keywords, my blog article announcing his site came up about 3rd in the results and his own site was about 10th. He was very dissapointed and “disallusioned” that my site came up for his search term and he threatened not to pay for the site. I pointed out that my post had a link to his and that his site might not have even been 10th if it wasn’t for my free publicity. I also showed him his google analytics stats which had 47% referrals from me! but he wasn’t having any of it!

In the end I had to delete my post and related tags then to go to Google webmaster tools and delete my blog post from there also.

Be careful!

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Sherry Fitzgerald, Carrick-on-Shannon – Named & Shamed

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I first contacted GMC Brokers on the 7th August 2008 via a link on MyHome.ie to ask about the possibility of getting a mortgage. I provided all manner of documentation to GMC so that they could seek approval in my name from the banks. To cut a long story short, its taken until today (8 months later!) to find out whats going on! I was told today that I was sent a letter late last year updating me on the progress of the application. I never received this letter or any other form of contact to let me know what was happening.

In the meantime I took a break from house hunting to enjoy our new baby and decided to chase up on the application the other day, to which I received the response above. I was also told that because so much time had passed since I first provided the application that I would basically have to do it all over again as banks would need up to date info!

Am I unreasonable to have expected that I at least get approval or disapproval in principle a little bit quicker than 8 months even allowing for a recession!? And am I unreasonable to assume that GMC might have chased me up or called me when they hadn’t heard from me for a while? Don’t they want the business in a time when no-one is applying for mortgages?

GMC Mortgages – Named & Shamed

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Its nice to see the parties and people up north, here and in the UK uniting to condenm the killings so lets hope this is only a blip and that we have indeed put violence to rest here and can continue to set an example to the rest of the world but I have my doubts. If there are lunatics out there that are prepared to SO go against the common flow then we should brace ourselves..

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It basically tells me that ebay doesn’t recognise my computer and that I’m obviously logging in from a new pc and location. Unless someone broke in today and robbed my custom made powerhouse and left an identical pc in its place (while I was sitting here!) then this is slightly inaccurate! And unless I’m working way too hard and beginning to hallucinate about my actual physical whereabouts then again, ebay, you’ve got it wrong.

So I go along with it and choose a number to receive a call on and sure enough I get a call from an ebay robot immediately to give me a pin number I need to put in the site to verify my ‘new’ computer. Pretty impressive technology I must say but ebay time and resources would be better spent addressing the concerns of disgruntled users.

I might have an ‘ebay gripes’ category soon!

Leon.

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To quote Russel Brand – “The Swines”!!

Leon.

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I’ve had my ebay store up for years now and last I heard it was about 8/9 euros a month which was fair enough. Ebay stores are handy for listing services or items that you can resell. Store items don’t come up as quick in ebay searches than auction items but its a lot cheaper to list in your store so I was happy to keep it up.

At some stage (I’ve no idea when) ebay increased the 8/9 euros to 19.99 euros per month for the basic shop. Thats DOUBLE the fee and with no email or explanation of what I’m getting for the increase. I’ve just cancelled my subscription and this leaves me with shag all activity or items on ebay and I might as well not have an account al all at this stage.

The general consensus these days is that ebay doesn’t give a shit about small time auction sellers and is re-structuring the site around power sellers and normal ‘buy it now’ sales. It probably wont be the auction site we’ve all come to know and love for much longer.

Somebody else, please start a new auction site for us or I’ll do it myself!?

Leon

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I pride myself on being Fast, Efficient and affordable. I’ve always been sadly efficient in most things I do, I used to do my homework in school BEFORE I came home and I got reports out of the way in college within hours of getting them and with months to go before they needed to be submitted. I’ve also got a touch of OCD in that everything I do, touch or live amidst has to be clean and tidy. These traits are a bit sad and would set me on a course for long term institutional care if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m running a business and when you run a business being efficient and tidy are essential!

Therefore, when someone ‘mistreats’ me either by calling my services expensive, or slow or just useless after I go out of my way for people then I tend to loose the head and tell them to get lost. This happened a couple of times in the last two years with a biggish projects when the clients continually demanded alterations to a site that I had said couldn’t and shouldn’t be done. Basically they wanted a 10k site for 2k and when they refused to listen to my advice as the designer and became a bit rude I had no option but to end the project. Even then I felt I had to finish off the site for my own professional pride and my reluctance to leave a job unfinished.

To compound matters, I wasn’t paid in full for these jobs and am still chasing the remainder of the money owed to me for one of them. The great thing about being in web design is that if I don’t get paid I retain control of the product and can ‘take back’ my work at any stage simply by taking down the site. Its a last resort of course but what other option do you have when clients take the piss?

PS – A message for anyone out there who receives an invoice and puts it on the long finger and forgets it – People like to be paid on time for work done, just like you would.

Leon.

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The new deal proposes to make it easier for low income earners to pay for their long stay care according to their means or what they can afford. Apparently up to 15% of the value of any property they own can be taken as part payment after they die. It is also intended that the children of elderly nursing home residents will not have to pay what they can’t afford and will not have to resort to re-mortgaging their homes to fund the costs.

This all begs the question – Isn’t 15% of the value of a house that is left in a will likely to be quite a large fee in the end!? We could be talking about 45,000 euros for a typical 300,000 euro house in Dublin that needs to be paid out by whoever inherits an estate from a long stay resident. Kinda defeats the purpose a bit I think.

Leon.

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Leon.

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On signup, I filled in my profile, added links to my site so people could see who I was and trust my opinion and advice and published my hub. Not long after I got an email saying my hub was flagged for being overly promotional!

I went back and removed some of the links and wrote some interesting (or so I thought!) articles on SEO and promptly got another email back saying my hub was flagged for being ‘Substandard’! Told them to delete my account and get lost.

One of the rudest and most useless web companies I’ve come across and I’ve been around!

Leon.

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Ebay has a feature called ‘Best Offer’ whereby a buyer can make an offer to a qualifying seller which is a bit lower than the advertised sale price. It helps the buyer get a better deal and it helps the seller shift something which wont sell as was my case.

So a reasonable offer came in for my item but I thought it was slightly low so I read up on the ebay website about the whole best offer thing and it said I could decline the offer and at the same time leave the buyer a message perhaps saying something like “if you go a little higher I can sell to you” or “you can have it for 50 euros more…” So I confidently declined the offer and prepared my message but guess what!? – there was no opportunity to send a message and no way of reversing the decision. The buyer’s details were also hidden so I’ve no way of contacting him now.

I lost out on a a few hundred euros and ebay lost out on sale commissions!

I’ve also sold the same phone twice now in the last few weeks and am about to sell it for a third time and none of the buyers paid or responded to my emails. I’ve absolutely no comeback!?

I really am tired of ebay now..

Leon.

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If you go HERE on the Linkedin site, login and upload your contacts file, eg – .csv export from Outlook Express as I did, it actually takes all your Outlook Express contacts and presents you with a list after upload which you can filter to remove those people you actually fell out with years ago and don’t want to talk to anymore!

On the filter list screen it says at the top – “These are your newly added contacts that are not yet connected to you on LinkedIn. Invite them to connect!”, so I obviously though they were all going to get emailed and asked to join Linkedin and join my network so I sent the mass email. Theres been a steady stream of people emailing me ever since asking me was this email spam or not as they had never heard of Linkedin and were certainly not a member of it!

Apparently what happened was, in the Linkedin email they made the cheeky presumption that my email contacts were ALREADY Linkedin members. The subject of the email sent was “Good to find you on LinkedIn”!! The first line reads – “I notice that you are also using LinkedIn…”! In the email footer is says this – “It is free to join…”! which suggests that they are not a member…

I don’t remember seeing this email or having a chance to modify it before it went so basically Linkedin needs to reword this email to avoid confusion, spam issues and people getting angry replies!

Leon.

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So all of us are gonna have to sign up for this thing whether we like it or not and anyway, I’m more than happy to live my whole life online, been doing everything else online for yonks now.

Figuring that signing up for a video, ‘pay as you go’ account would suit me best, I clicked ’signup’ and waited an eternity for the ‘Update in Progress..’ message to disappear after every piece of info I put in. I finally managed to get to the end of the huge form and clicked ‘Accept & Submit’ only to be told that there was an error and to contact support!

I tried again in Internet Explorer 6.0 in case it was a browser issue, taking the same eternity to get through it and was told my chosen username and email address already existed! I gave up.

Seems its not only a ‘barrier free tolling’ solution but a ’signup free’ zone too!

Leon.

* UPDATE - I’ve now tried 4 times via the site and twice over a dodgy phone line and still havn’t managed to signup! No replies to my support email either…I was told to use a different username and email on the site signup but it remembered my car reg and wouldn’t let me continue!

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I’m been singing ebay’s praises and using their excellent services (mostly as a seller) for years now but they’ve been pissing me off lately for the following reasons:

• They wont reply to my any emails.
• They are not contactable in any way!
• They no longer allow account and feedback merging.
• They deprive Irish customers of excellent features available in other countries.
• They are getting way to officious, pedantic and ignorant.
• I can’t find out how to unsubscribe from their overlong, USA focused newsletters.
• And now I can’t give a buyer negative feedback even if he messes me around!!!???

Whats goin on ebay, power goin to your heads!?

Leon.

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Basically whenever I’m on a call I have to run around the house or the garden looking for a sweet spot so I can hear, not ideal. Add to that the fact that I have no land line and my O2 mobile broadband and skype cuts out for days sometimes and I can be incommunicado which ain’t good for business.

Vodafone say that they have 99% coverage in Ireland and wouldn’t you know it I’m in the 1% along with the bleedin Blasket Islands probably. So I thought that since theres an O2 mast within 3 miles and I have O2 broadband through it (ish) and since the new & improved iphone is now out, I’d kill two birds with one stone by porting my vodafone number to O2. Easy right!?

After a few phone calls to vodafone and me pointing out that it was a bit unfair that I had to ‘buy out’ the remainder of my contract just to get a better signal, the problem not being my fault, I got no joy. I have to pay about €60/€70 (a lot more if there weren’t only a few months left of the contract) just to move operators, seems vodafone make no guarantees about signal quality ‘indoors’ and it says so ‘clearly’ in my terms and conditions. Maybe that would be a valid point if I could get a decent signal outdoors but I can’t!

I have to have a debate with myself now as to whether I want to tow the line and fork up or fight for whats right or just wait till the contract finishes and the iphone palava dies down!!

Leon.

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So I came accross this website http://savethedevelopers.org/ which attempts to publicize the plight of us poor web designers and developers who slave away on the perfect website for weeks, tweaking the very smallest details to ensure perfection (well maybe this is just me and my ocd!) and then we go and test it in as many browsers as possible to see how it looks.

Most developers use the likes of Firefox to browse the internet cause we know the best stuff to use mostly and we design and check away using firefox leaving the cross browser checking untill last and guess what!? Its perfect in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer 7.0 but in the most popular (but oldest and worst!) browser its all over the place.

I’m not just talking about text slightly misaligned here and there but whole sections can be in the opposite end of the page from what you intended! The only solution is to plugin certain fixes especially for IE6 but this can take forever.

I and savethedevelopers.org are asking you all to please update your browsers either by allowing windows to automatically download Internet Explorer 7.0 (its FREE) or go and download one of the other fine browsers out there (also all FREE).

If you dont know what browser you are using, if you seen a graphic link to savethedevelopers.org top right of this website when you fist came then you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 and need to go upgrade now or I will be ver cross! If you didnt see anything then congratulations, you are moving with the times!

You can get better browsers here – http://savethedevelopers.org/

Leon

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Leon.

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Leitrim Council Chairman welcomes new broadband strategy Jun 24, 7:01 am

The Chairman of Leitrim County Council Damien Brennan says he believes the fact that Ireland is so far behind in relation to the provision of broadband may work in our favour when it comes to the modernization and roll out of the service in the new Government strategy.

Councillor Brennan’s comments come in the wake of Government’s new plan to ensure the entire country will have broadband coverage by next year.

Leitrim County Council have been in talks with Government officials in recent months about making a good quality broadband service available in all parts of Leitrim.

Councillor Brennan says broadband is essential for attracting businesses to the county.

This doesn’t really fit in with the news I got recently from a local broadband company saying that they couldn’t give me broadband because the council had refused them permission to use the land due to a fear of ’squatters rights”!!

I’m still waiting on someone from the council to explain the whole thing to me months later…

Leon.

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Here what happens when I request a service form the guy who cuts the grass or fixes the boiler:

• I ring said tradesman and ask if he can do the job, if he can..
• I ask for a quotation/price..
• If I’m happy with the price I say go ahead.
• He comes and does the job, I satisfy myself that its done properly.
• I pay him there and then or as soon as he bills me.

What I don’t do is tell the guy, after I’ve agreed to the price and am satisfied with the work, that I’ll pay him in a few weeks or that money is tight right now or just ignore his invoice and communication attempts.

I’d expect this process is the same for any business service and anyone with any manners or consideration would not tell someone to go ahead with a job knowing that they might not be able to pay when the time came or ignoring invoices that came in.

This is what is happening to me a lot these days, even though people say they are happy with my work I’m still waiting on a 5 figure sum from a number of clients collectively.

For those in any doubt on either side of the fence, having to ask to be paid for a finished job more than once is DEAD WRONG. You know who you are!!

Leon.

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I emailed Leitrim County Council at 3 different addresses listed on their website www.leitrimcoco.ie around about the time of that post and guess what – no reply!

I just wanted to ask them for more info on their reckless decision to halt the progress of broadband supply for the county, oh and to give out of course! I think its awful that the body in charge of running the county and making it a better place for us all to live and work can first of all block my broadband and secondly ignore my communication attempts. I can’t say it surprises me though. Heres how I feel about people not replying to emails – replying-to-email and heres an excerpt from the council’s ‘About Us’ page:

“We view our website as another means of communicating with the people who presently and will in the future avail of our services or simply require information in relation to this authority…”!!

Leon.

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I’d been waiting on a call from this company for 3 weeks and counting the days since they were at the house and said that while there was no signal then, there should be when the new transmitter goes up in 3 weeks. I got the call today to say that they were refused permission to put up the transmitter and therefore couldn’t provide me with much needed broadband.

Now while you have to expect objections to things like mobile and broadband masts going up in rural areas, I wasn’t prepared for the reason for their refusal as given to me by the broadband company! Apparently the company had been told that they were being turned down because of a fear of ’squatters rights’ on the council’s land. Someone in the council had seen a ‘Late Late Show’ discussion on the recent Pat Kenny court case and got scared enough to back out. The implications of this decision are that I and a lot of other people in the area who have been waiting for a proper broadband service for years will be denied further. Its another block on progress and might possibly put me out of business considering you can’t run a web design company without a fast internet connection..!

Back to the drawing board.

Leon.

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My theory is that because the person I email is not psychically in the room and might be on another continent even, they feel that there will be no repercussions if they put it aside for a while or even delete it. Fair enough you say if your email is of no interest to them or you’re a spammer! But what if I’m emailing a company enquiring about a service?

Last year I had cause to seek out a Web Design company to outsource some work to that I hadn’t the talents or time for myself so I googled some local ones and finalized a list of about 4/5 to contact. After having emailed them all and hinting that my client was a large company with a presence in a few international territories, I sat back and waited for the responses to flood in. Surely a web design company would be able to check emails regularly and get back to people pronto. Not! Out of 5 I emailed, 2 never replied at all, 2 took a few days to reply and 1 got back after a few hours. The one that got back to me quickest however, didn’t have the time obviously to fully read my email (it wasn’t a life story) and respond to the actual questions I asked.

The trouble is, because of my geographical location, principles when it comes to phone companies (Eircom ****s) and the fact that I’m in front of the PC all day, my main form of communication has become email. For me email is the ideal form of communication as you can carefully prepare what you want to say, get it to someone immediately and include all manner of media and attachments to illustrate your point.

Those companies who refuse to move out of the dark ages and don’t have the intelligence and foresight to realize how fantastic a customer or potential client feels when they get an immediate email reply and the benefits this has in terms of ‘good customer service’ (whaas da?, I hear them say) will eventually loose out in some way and so they should.

Please don’t be one of these companies. If you have an email address and if you promote it in any way then use it.

Leon

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Then I remembered seeing my partner’s sister’s boyfriend with an O2 thing about 3 miles down the road in a house I used to live in and tried desperately to attract broadband to for 3 years, and it worked perfectly. So off I went to the local O2 store and picked one up. I had the option of bringing it back if I couldn’t get a signal but the coverage map I was shown in the shop indicated I should be within range and surely if a house 3 miles away could get it I could too because mobile signals are strong with a wide range and not line of sight dependant aren’t they!?

About a week later and after numerous calls to O2 data support I still hadn’t picked up a broadband signal but I knew there was something seriously wrong because I had identified the actual mast serving me and gone out in the car with the laptop and sat at its foot and still nothing. Eventually I managed to get through to someone in O2 who had their brain turned on before they came to work and he was able to suggest that I go in to the device’s menu and check to see what speed it what set to connect at. Incredibly the default setting was to connect at the lower speed even though this was supposed to be a broadband modem! So I set it to look for the fastest speed and for the next 2 months it worked pretty perfectly at home, only failing to find the 3G signal a small handful of times.

This is when I made the fatal mistake of telling everyone I knew, which included a group of about 50 local residents from a broadband survey I had done a few years previous, to go out and get one of these great new devices and forget about Eircom. A great new technology is born!

I had been keeping track of my download speeds via an online speed test site and I noticed a gradual decline in speeds which I put down to the fact that a good chunk of the people I told to go get a modem actually did, damn them! With any broadband connection the more locals using it the slower it gets for everyone. Indeed when I rang O2 support (again) and told them how many people I told to go get one of their modems, rather than congratulating me for bringing them extra business, they laughed at me!

Then the modem started acting weird, like the computer telling me the modem wasn’t connected to it when it clearly was so I rang O2 support again and they emailed me a link to go and download updated drivers which they ensured me would fix the problem and make my modem better. I reasonably assumed that this would happen and that the modem would now pick up an even stronger signal and be faster but in the 2/3 weeks since I updated the drivers, I’ve only got the broadband signal a handful of times. Seems the update made the modem worse so now I’m connecting at dialup speeds and trying to run an IT business with that. The horrible nightmares of having to scrap my business and go and find a ‘proper 9 to 5′ like everyone else have come back to haunt me.

Moving house for the 5th time in 4 years in not an option anymore and there are no broadband providers left that I can try so the future is bleak. Nothing has really changed for me since I first moved to Leitrim in 2003 and assumed someone would be able to provide me with some kind of fast internet to help me get my fledgling business off the ground. For me Ireland is still backward outside Dublin.

The moral of the story is, if you have to get one of these Mobile Broadband packages from any of the companies currently offering them, be prepared for serious unreliability in both hardware and connection speeds if you’re outside a major metropolitan area, don’t accept any driver updates and don’t tell anyone about it!

Leon

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