Eclipse Internet www.eclipse.net.uk Review

Overall Rating

Pretty good upload speeds

Service declined to the point where Eclipse obviously weren't bothered whether I gave them my custom or not.

Started off pretty good. I was on a rolling monthly contract with them using their 'Business 20' service.

I had been with them for a year as a business customer, but due to a change in my business procedures I had an increase in my usage and was nearly reaching my 20Gb monthly limit each month (it's one pound per gigabyte if you choose to exceed this) so called them to ask for advice, thinking I might change to their top residential package which offered unlimited usage (under their fair usage agreement). I was then informed that I could use the service between the hours of 11pm to 9am without accumulating any extra units on my monthly allowance, so I started to do this when necessary, sometimes downloading 5 or 6 Gb overnight.

During this conversation I was told that I would be able to upgrade my connection speed from my current 7Mb to 13Mb for no extra charge, naturally I was interested in this and was told that I would have to sign up for a 12 month contract rather than the monthly one I was currently on. I agreed, and was told the speed increase would take about 12 hours. The next day I saw that my connection speed, measured using my router, had decreased from 7Mb to 5Mb. I immediately complained, and after a few days of wrangling with Eclipse was sent an email saying that I could pull out from my contract if I gave a months notice, but there was no way to increase my bandwidth back to 7Mb. I was disapponted to say the least.

Anyway, I was pleased that I could download without restriction for free overnight, so stuck with them. This went on for 2 months, until three quarters of the way through the month when suddenly one morning my connection was capped at a 256k speed limit, which is how they react when usage allowance has been expended. It was backed up with an email confirming this.

I went online and had a look at my connection manager (quite a good part of the service they offer) which showed me that 20Gb had been used, and it was easy to see that there were 2 large spikes in the graph representing 2 particular downloads I had made earlier in the month and which I was aware of. I cross referenced these to my computer's download logs which showed the downloads had occurred overnight (as scheduled).

I emailed a ticket to them using the Eclipse ticketing system (Eclipse customer services and Eclipse technical support were both closed during the weekend, which is something they didn't used to do when I first signed up with them), using their system I marked the ticket 'urgent', and waited for their response. As you can probably guess, it never came so I had to call them.

I spoke to an agent who said it definitely looked like a mistake, and he would call me back within an hour. The next day my call was returned, and I was told that my issue was with Eclipse's development department under review. I had an friendly conversation with the customer services guy where he said the development team were very quick and that I should expect my issue to be resolved that day.

Three days later, after no response at all, I called them again this time I spoke to an agent on customer services who, after consulting an agent I had spoken to earlier, came back to the phone and said that the development team had dismissed my claim and that I had simply reached my monthly limit. I know I hadn't. I explained that even Eclipse's online log showed that the two high usage spikes correlated to my download logs and it was absolutely and definitely overnight - I even posted the exact times the downloads began and ended on both occasions - to the nearest second - and the agent accepted this. She then told me that this would have to be investigated as I had marked the ticket 'urgent', and that an Eclipse manager would be calling me to resolve the issue later on that day, she also said that she would email the last months usage logs to me which she had in spreadsheet form.

Of course, nobody called me but I did receive the excel spreadsheet, marked 'usage report march-apr 2009' but it was a blank spreadsheet containing no data.
I replied to the email saying that there was something wrong with the spreadsheet and requested another one.

I'll just add at this point that in my initial ticket to Eclipse I stated that I was disappointed by their mistake and, as I was considering changing to another broadband provider, the manner and execution of their response to my issue would be pivotal in my decision.

I then had a couple of days away from the office, but when I returned there were no missed calls or messages from Eclipse. I went online and noticed that my ticket was no longer marked 'With customer services', but instead was now marked 'Closed'.

I was quite alarmed by this - my monthly allowance had now reset, as it was due to, so I had to assume that customer services had decided that I would be a happy customer now that I wasn't having to pay an extra one pound per gigabyte, and therefore closed the ticket and that there was no reason to inform me of their action.

I called them one final time, not before calling another ISP and arranging to change over to them. When I got through to an agent in Eclipse's customer services department she claimed that I had simply gone over my allowance, simple as that. There were no references to my previous conversations with the other two customer service agents that I had spoken to, nor my promised call from a manager, and overall the tone of this agent was defensive and a little accusatory. She referred to me as a 'heavy user' as I had "downloaded around 60Gb per month on average for the last two months", which was a) wrong, and b) irrelevant, as when I questioned her abut it she admitted that the figure included the overnight 'free' usage. She couldn't explain why she had informed me of this. She didn't explain if there was or wasn't a cap on overnight downloading for business users.
I asked her twice if Eclipse actually wanted to retain my custom, but she ignored the question.

I am now in the process of switching ISP, and will not use Eclipse again. I even recommended them to a couple of friends, but that was in the honeymoon days with Eclipse - I regret that.

There are quite a few other things that were said by customer services that would add to this review, but I think I've explained my experience in enough detail already.