Ice Brodband keeps its customers out in the cold

limerick | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday June 30, 2009 14:37 by Irate Murroevian

Despite no mention on the company website this customer can confirm that the Ice Broadband service in East Limerick has been down for the past nine days and the company is stil not able to give any indication of when the service will be reinstated.

Despite many telephone queries by customers during the first day of the outage the company failed to make any contact with its customers until 17:25 on Monday 22nd June. A text message that gave no indication of the nature of the problem or when they expected to have the service restored read: “Due to a hardware failure the service is currently down an engineer is currently working to resolved the issue a further update will follow regards Ice”

The following day the company blamed a third party for the lack of service and again was unable to specify the nature of the problem or when it would be restored. Another text message read: “Dear Customer a 3rd party provider is working to resolve the issue at present we are currently waiting on an update about this hardware failure regards ice”

On Wednesday there was still no information available from the customer support staff just another bland text message: “Dear Customer, We are still currently awaiting an update from the third party contractor we hope to have a full update this morning. Kind regards Ice BB” At 17:05 that evening another message: “Dear Customer, Service will not be restored this evening, our 3rd party contractor is still on site, A full update will be sent to you by 12pm 25/06/2009”

On Thursday at 12:54 another text: “Due to a 3rd party complete hardware failure we are currently awaiting parts to arrive on site. A text will be sent later with a eta for normal service resuming” That afternoon a text message at 15:08 “We apologize for the inconvenience and interruption to your service, the services will be resumed by closed business tomorrow. Regards, IceBB.”

The service was not restored on Friday and the company never bothered to inform its customers. On Saturday morning at 10:30 another text “Dear Customer, we apologize for the inconvenience and interrupted service and apologize for the delay with the work in you area and will update you ASAP.

No further communication has been issued by Ice Broadband and despite several attempts on Monday to get information by phone by a number customers nobody was able to give any indication of when the service would be restored. The customer service staff are badly informed and know no more about the problem that the information relayed by text mesages. No one with any expertise or information about the nature of the problem was availabe to speak. Despite assurances that a member of the management would return a call no such call has been received.

Ice Broadband have shown total disregard for its customers needs, failed to keep its customers updated with any useful information and failed to have the service restored in an efficient and timely manner.