Fergus Cassidy

So long suckers

I GET it from my mother I reckon. She always kept any official document such as a receipt etc for a long, long time. When she died a couple of years ago, I found a treasure trove of paper and was very careful with it for fear that I would miss something.

Such as: "Dear Mrs Cassidy, thank you for the lovely tea and sandwiches and particularly for your advice on how I should proceed. Yours sincerely, Jim Larkin".

Or: "Dear Mrs Cassidy, thank you so much for your letter. I will indeed switch to a diamond formation and use the wing backs to attack. Yours etc Jack Charlton."

She was that kind of person. Keep EVERYTHING, just in case. And she left me with more than a rub of her own magpie mimicry.

For I now have a record of payments going back for years to what I affectionately (well some of the time) used to call Telecom Eireann, but in deference to the libel lawyers, I now refer to simply as Eircom.

And having just gone through a scene straight from an Indiana Jones movie, I removed my breathing apparatus and dusted off the old telephone bills. And boy, did they bring back painful memories. These are from last year:

Jan - E358
March - E334
May - E429
July - E310
Sept - E403

The memories, the hurt, the pain. What had I unearthed? For that year my total payment for telephone service to Eircom was almost E1800 and as you might have easily guessed most of which was for connection to the internet.

Such trauma does take a while to go away, but this week the gods shone down on me. The postman arrived with the latest addition to my burgeoning Eircom bill collection. I opened it and suddenly saw the ground rising toward me. I leaned toward the door and grasped for air. Loosening my top shirt buttons, I eventually managed to sit down.

I must be dreaming. The numbers just jumped off the page and smacked me around the head until I regained my composure. I ran out to the front of the house and roared it out, driving hundreds of rooks out of their mid-morning siesta in the woods nearby.

"Total bill: E47.16"!!!!

If it keeps going like that for the rest of this year, it means that my total yearly payment to Eircom will have gone from E1800 to E300 in the space of 12 months. Yes a good chunk now goes to a different service provider, but the huge drop in revenue for Eircom just from me is worthy of some consideration.

Because although I don't have hard and fast figures on this, I've come across more than enough anecdotal evidence to reason that there has been a substantial haemorrhaging of some big-paying domestic customers away from Eircom. Most of them people like me, for whom, whatever the reason, the internet is a significant part of their lives.

This stampede from Eircom is not being taken lying down and there's a name for the tussle over customers who leave. Winback. Operation Winback I suppose. There are even rules to abide by. Limited time is given to tempt back wayward customers; phone calls, letters and even visits.

When a car pulled up outside the door recently, I knew immediately it was the Man from Eircom. "Would you consider coming back to Eircom?" It's must be one of the hardest jobs in acting to be all honest and sincere on the outside while the laughter is twisting you up inside. I failed miserably.

What the hell is going on? This company wore its feet down to the stumps in the dragging to avoid the threat of competition. Now that it is getting closer (not fast enough, but better than it was) it seems that fear is beginning to take hold. What else could it be, that the response to losing customers is to pump up the marketing volume and join Operation Winback? Wouldn't it make more sense to give people what they need and want, instead of trying to use marketing ploys to keep customers who would be off like a hare at a greyhound track if they could?

Instead why not try the old fashioned way? What the kids used to call 'growing the business'. I've no idea what it's called these days and Eircom doesn't seem to be the sort of company that is going to provide an answer.

Rumours circulate of some sort of novel fund raising accountancy method, which has to do with revenue from future phone bills and which seems to have been only tried so far in places like Venezuela and Argentina. This is a company that seems to want to do everything else but progress and become part of the future telecoms landscape in Ireland.

In a note included with my recent bill, it said that the line rental charge had increased from 18 March because "line rental charges are used to maintain and update the infrastructure connecting each customer to their local telephone exchange and currently Eircom is incurring a huge loss of approx E170m in this area."

Again with the negativity. Putting capital into infrastructure is the norm for any company that plans a future. That's why it's called investment. For the future. The sort of future that lies ahead in the telecoms field includes: wireless net access; voice over internet protocol; matching of phone numbers with the Domain Name System; ultrawideband; P2P networks, satellite and fibre. All are serious threats to revenue for telephone companies.

The response so far from Eircom to revenue loss is to dispatch letters, phone calls and the Man from Eircom. Like a latter-day King Canute, methinks the game will soon be up. The current situation just can't continue.

I'll leave the last word to Eircom and the same note in my bill said that "even with these recent increases, the average residential bill is still 8.6% cheaper than it was four years ago."

Oh no, it's a lot, lot cheaper than that.