no Vodafone 3g internet!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: November 25th, 2010 | 0 Comments

I recently switched over to the Vodafone network from o2 and up until now I have been happy with everything, that was because everything worked! But today the internet broke! Shock, everything was falling apart without internet :o . Okay it wasn't that bad, however it is unusual that the internet would go down for that long. Usually I would check my email and the likes of that and whenever I am in class whenever I become bored (which is a lot of the time!) I would look up some news. Anyway today is a short day for me, even more so that I was a bit late for college! But not having the internet on my phone was a bit of a pain! I went into town to see if it was just my phone that might of had a problem but it turns out there is a huge outage in the area. Strange though that I had full 3g coverage which is required for the internet and yet it still didn't work. Hopefully it begins working again tomorrow, can't let smemon beat me in Foursquare;)

Porting numbers

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: August 27th, 2009 | 2 Comments

A few days ago i decided it was about time i bought a new mobile; i had been hoping to get an iPhone however i am not willing to fork out up to €600 to get one. So instead i decided to get a really great phone made by LG.

The phone i bought is the LG GW520; it is a great phone and was definitely worth buying it. It has a touch screen and even has a full QWERTY keyboard which slides out from underneath it, so anyone who is good at typing and knows where all the keys are, then you would really like this phone :D .

So originally my network operator was Vodafone and when i was looking about for a new phone the options they had were pretty lame, so i decided to have a look at o2's phone's and they were so much better, they have a lot of ' exclusive to o2 ' phones, and the LG phone i bought was one of them.

The phone only cost me €199 and you even get €50 free credit, what more could you ask for :D . The stupid thing was that since i wanted to change over from Vodafone to o2 there was going to be a bit of trouble.

Since i had once been with o2 and then went to Vodafone, in order to go back to o2 once again it requires some kind of special sim card. So it turned out they had none of the sim cards that i needed left in stock in any of the stores in my town so i had to wait about a week before they would have them! Like how do you run out of sim cards?

The stupid thing is that if i had been transferring over from Vodafone to o2 for the first time then they could have given me a sim card no problem or if i wanted a new number then it would not have been a problem either. The thing i would like to know is, how sim cards are so different, surely they are all built the same way.

So to port my number from the Vodafone network to the o2 network took a bit of time, but it was definitely worth it, the price plans are slightly cheaper with o2 than Vodafone.

I also looked around online to buy my LG phone and even considered getting it unlocked so i could of used it on Vodafone, but it worked out more expensive and o2 seemed to have the best deal on it.

Eircom Hacked?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 19th, 2009 | 5 Comments

My internet service provider (ISP) is Eircom. I always notice that my c0nnection is really slow, and apparently that is to be expected with Eircom.

However last Monday my broadband was actually cutting out now and again and was becoming slow at loading pages every so often. I thought nothing of it, I just put it down to the fact that Eircom's broadband was always that slow.

Then on Wednesday of this week I was reading the newspaper (The Argus) and found an article saying that Eircom had been in fact hacked on the Monday night that I had experienced the really slow page load speed!

Apparently a lot of unwanted traffic was directed to the Eircom servers, which caused a strain on the servers and by chain reaction caused a lot of users to experience either really slow speeds or to lose their internet connection completely.

I then went over to Eircom's tech support page and saw a customer notice explaining the problem that occurred, the article below is the notice they published to their site which was put up the day after the problem was fixed.

I was also reading an article about how Eircom are fully aware that there network is slow at times, and apparently they say they have no intention in the near future of upgrading their networks. You would think that since they are one of the most popular Internet Service Provider's in Ireland that they would want to have the best service available.

We currently subscribe to a package for our landline and our broadband to be in one bundle. When you sign up to Eircom you must take out a one year contract with them, it is a clause they have built in to keep their customers.

However our one year contract is up and we have begun to look at other providers to see what they have to offer. Recently Vodafone have started to offer a bundle for your landline and broadband and are giving it at a much better price.

My current broadband speed it 3mb however I could change to Vodafone and upgrade my broadband to 7.6mb and still save money!

The only thing stopping me at the moment from changing is that I have to find out more about their broadband.

First I want to see if it is actually good and second is they say they have a 30gb download limit, I want to know if they actually enforce this limit or do they let you away with going over it because I know with Eircom they have the same limit however they do not enforce any penalties if you go over it.