For the past several years my family has been a customer of Eclipse Broadband, and up until I went to university three years ago we had, had no problem with them as they provided a very reliable, cheap and quick connection. However for one reason or another this has all changed over the past three years. I began to notice several outages of service even though I was at university because photogabble is hosted on my server at home, then came the speed differences so far as the server was involved this didn’t cause a problem due to no restrictions effecting upload speed, however download speeds had all but reduced to nothing during the day and only became slightly acceptable during the night. This has done nothing but worsened over the past three months, I have indeed noticed that during the day the connection we retrieve is less than 512Kbit and right now it’s less reliable than a 22K modem connection! I am currently downloading new nvidia drivers for my graphics card at no more than 2.5KB/s for an apparently 8Mbit connection this is terrible service. Due to the recent degradation of service over the past three days I have taken to searching the internet for reviews on Eclipse Broadband to be confronted by negative review after negative review such as:
Don’t go anywhere near Eclipse if you ever want to download. Doesn’t matter if you have the top end unlimited package. Eclipse throttle ALL downloads. – Vambo
At 3am I can get a good 375kbs but at any normal time of the day I’m lucky to get around 50kbs. avoid them like the plague. – Not a Happy Man
Internet access is a total lottery and download speeds are pathetic. – Gabby
They still can’t get their act together to send an accurate final bill. I do not recommend Eclipse Internet Broadband. Ever. - Afmspace
Phoned their IT department to try and sort out the problems and in my opinion they were useless. - mdyches
Even though an unlimited, 8MB connection is promised, I continuously find it hard to reach a speed of 512kb - chimp14uk
So it appears i’m not alone, a large collection of bad reviews all documenting similar problems of poor service and terrible support. Unfortunately the broadband is paid for by parents as i’m staying at theirs for the summer and there is nothing I can do other than weather it out as they appear to be quite happy with it even with mine and my sisters complaints. While at university I have used ask4 and virgin broadband, both delivered me full 20Mbit broadband with no problems, we had one disruption with the virgin broadband and within a couple of hours of our call it was fixed I hate to imagine how long its taken eclipse to fix outages proof of their slowness is just a google away. Anyway less of the ranting, i’m off to look for an effective broadband package for going back to uni and possibly my own mobile broadband package for when at home.
the download slowdown is not limited to eclipse… demon (who i have been a happy customer with since broadband was invented) is also falling victim to it… my guess is that with more and more people using broadband for streaming radio, etc, the copper infrastructure (originally designed to handle analogue voice calls) that supports it is buckling under the strain
In response to brett: I agree, I have seen similar complaints across the whole range of broadband providers. However none have slowed down quite as much as eclipse so far as I have seen. 5KB/second for more than 18 hours of the day is really not good in any providers books.
agreed :-/