Rise in faults and repair times for Eircom

EIRCOM is attracting rocketing complaints from phone customers about faults while taking longer to deal with repairs, the Government’s phones watchdog ComReg said yesterday.

ComReg also said it was concerned about the length of time people were waiting to get working phone lines installed in their homes.

Yesterday ComReg released figures showing how Eircom performed in the first nine months of last year. They revealed that Eircom had reduced the amount of time most householders had to wait to get phone lines installed from 40 days in early 2006 down to 13 by September.

Almost nine-in-10 requests were completed by the agreed date although small but growing number of customers were still waiting after a year.

The number of fault reported rose from 4.54 per 100 residential lines to 5.8 – up 28% in nine months. The time taken by Eircom to put most faults right increased from 55.4 working hours, equivalent to eight days, to 69.9 hours or 10 working days — up 26%.

But complaints about accuracy of bills issued by the company dropped from 11 per 10,000 bills to four per 10,000 — a fall of 64%.

Eircom just missed the target of ensuring that 94% of home phone lines were able to cope with the lowest basic speed of a dial-up internet connection.

ComReg chairman Mike Byrne said: “We are concerned about the situation regarding faults. Both the incidence of faults and the time required to attend to these have increased.”

Consumers’ Association of Ireland chairman Michael Kilcoyne said: “ComReg is very easy on Eircom and its public service obligations, and it should be putting the boot in. We’ve seen recently in the west of Ireland where people went without phones for three weeks yet we’re the second wealthiest country in the eurozone.”

Eircom spokesman Paul Bradley said unusually wet and stormy weather in 2006 contributed to a rise in faults but the company had spent €5m in overtime to clear a recent backlog.