Eclipse Internet www.eclipse.net.uk

after writing, and phoning many times to cancel any services from this company my Mother has not heard from them in 3 years only to receive a threatening demand for a overdue balance, which is completely fabricated, my mother foolishly signed up after a cold call for outsourcing call to them but as we have moved to BT Digital voice 2 years ago, and had a new number it would be impossible to make any calls through them,

please stop harassing my 86 mother this all cause worry and stress

I have been with Eclipse since the late 1990s. At the time they were one of the few domestic/small business providers that would provide a fixed ip routed subnet. Over the years however, their customer service and an element of technical support has deteriorated beyond belief.

As an IT professional I am fortunate enough not to need to contact them very often. However, when I do need technical support, it is usually for technical changes to the details surrounding my routed subnet. This is where their technical support team let them down big time. The customer portal where changes can be requested has not worked properly for at least 5 years, despite having raised the issue with them on many occasions. Last week, the section of the customer portal that allows you to raise support tickets was not working. Again, I reported this via another method, but received no response.

This week it has taken me four days to arrange a change to the reverse DNS records for my routed subnet, something that should only take a maximum of 5 minutes. Almost every support person I spoke with, or had an email conversation with, really didn’t know what I was talking about, and certainly didn’t know how to go about making the necessary changes. After 4 days someone finally made the changes for me, but left a trailing space in one of my pointer records, resulting in countless connection problems with other servers which required reverse lookups to match forwards.

Connectivity overall is generally pretty good, although there are regular short term failures at round 2 or 3 am. However, in my experience, these outages are always denied.

The customer service team have demonstrated over the years that they are not so much interested in customer service, but that of closing sales, regardless of service quality. Any request to make even the smallest change to the service I have, is always offered with a pre-requisite to renew any contract. This leads me to be suspicious of their current financial standing, and the long term sustainability of their business.

The last change I requested was a change from limited monthly download allowance to unlimited. No change in speed or any other part of the service. This resulted in an immediate request for me to confirm I wanted to enter into another 2-year contract. I reluctantly agreed.

My service was then de-graded for several days, a new router arrived at my home, with a package welcoming me to my new service. In addition, I received email confirmation that an engineer would be at my home to install the new line.

On querying the above with the customer service team, I was told there had been no change to my service, and that there was no degradation whatsoever. They confirmed that a mistake had been made with regard the “new customer” pack sent out.

However, when I called the technical support team immediately after talking to the customer service team, and a chap there confirmed that for reasons he couldn’t explain, my service had been downgraded.

On challenging the customer service team about this the next day, they denied that one of their tech support team had even spoken to me. I followed this up by sending a word for word transcript of the conversation I had had with the technical support chap, to the customer service team. I received no response.

A this point I requested to cancel the upgrade and the new contract, with a view to changing to another service provider. The customer service team confirmed that they would cancel my service, but that I would have to pay two years’ worth of charges – this despite requesting the cancellation within 14 days.

Eclipse internet are certainly not professional, although I would agree that they probably provide a fairly middle of the road basic IP service. However, if you need anything more, small business, fixed IP, or anything larger, then you would do well to look elsewhere for a cheaper and better product/service.

It is always disappointing when a small independent company with a good team, good customer service, and good overall attitude is swallowed up by a bigger corporation. This almost always leads to a reduction in customer service and attitude towards customers.

My contract comes to and end next summer, and I am ready to move to my new provider.

13 years I've been a customer of Eclipse and I've always sung their praises and recommended them to friends (I'm certain they've had a few sales out of me) however in recent years I've started to see a decline.

Don't get me wrong, I truly believe that you get what you pay for which is why I've continued to pay above the going rate for Eclipse and was very happy to when I upgraded to fibre despite better deals elsewhere... but as other providers have dropped prices Eclipse have failed to do so and it's only the fact that my employer pay a portion of my costs (since I'm a home worker) that has stopped me from looking for a better deal.

What makes this worse though is I'm starting to notice that traffic in some areas is being throttled. Given speedtest.net shows that I'm seeing speeds of near 40 Mbps I'm finding it impossible to stream video from places like YouTube during the day and downloading an HD movie from iTunes often shows it's estimated time in excess of 60 hours if I start it turing the day.

Then their "fair usage" policy seems all screwed. I'm limited during the hours of 09:00 and 23:00 on weekdays which I can live with... and I realise that my connection will be throttled if I exceed my allowance but what I didn't know until after 5 days of email hockey was that throttling apparently happens 24/7 (which is odd since my speed test at 08:58 on a Sunday showed I was running full speed which it did not 2 minutes later).

Worse, I'd blown my lower limit years ago and had been regraded quite quickly; this time, despite having placed the order while I was still within my limit I was told I'd have to wait 7 days and, if I wanted my speed back, pay a premium for 1 Mb chunks of data.

That, and I am currently waiting a day between each of my complaints to get a response which seems to be more of a canned reply than an actual thought out reply to a loyal customer.

5 years ago I'd have given this company a 10/10, today it's barely 2/10. If you're thinking of switching to Eclipse, don't. Unless they sort this out before my current contract ends I will be taking my business elsewhere.

What they don't tell you is that even though the connection is "unmetered" and the throttling is "Not applicable as there is no product data cap", they do indeed throttle your connection.

If you go over 10GB it would seem, your 80MBPs connection will be throttled, not to 20MB, not to 10MB, but 2MB/sec.

This is about as much use to a business as dial-up.

I'm trying to get out of the contract now, am a business to business seller, and within the 14 days of supply date so should be OK..

Please take my advice and don't bother, there are better ISPs. Hell even BT is better.!

Been with them for a long time, the ONLY good thing has been their connection has been good not excellent but good.

Now why everyone should avoid Eclipse

1. Eclipse focuses more on its business element than residential

2. their packages are OVER PRICED

3. Very irritating datacap (20GB)

4. When you exceed datacap your speeds is slowed down to 'dial up' speed

5. Unlimited package is a method to upsell you because the dial up speed is very annoying thus they say upgrade to a larger data allowance which means more money

To conclude, if you are thinking of purchasing a contract based on their 'excellent' reliability, DONT! this is because we have come very far from dial up connection many of the ISP (Internet Service Providers) are doing everything to keep a good line. Eclipse however feels that based on this ONE 'good' factor they can attract custom then upsell to their expensive packages. To top it BT are upgrading lines which will mean you will benefit anyway.

I seriously hope you do not get hypnotised into their 'excellent' reliability marketing strategy, look away now before its too late!

Firstly, I was with Eclipse for just under 14 years. You don't care really, which is pretty much how much Eclipse cared.

So I phone them up to cancel the rather overpriced broadband (which loves to throttle your download speeds just because), five weeks before I'm due to move house, and am told that because I've given plenty of notice, I just need to pay up until my cancellation date. Cool.

But what's this? On the final day, I get charged for another month, plus a £30 disconnection charge. A £53 charge that I wasn't expecting to have to pay, because the Customer Service Representative had assured me on the phone that this wouldn't happen.

So, congratulations Eclipse, you made another £53 from me, dishonestly.

I am a fairly light user and the 20GB pm limit imposed by eclipse has generally been sufficient. However I have allegedly exceeded this month and have been throttled to a ridiculous 0.2 Mb/s. I never use P2P networks, have downloaded a couple of music albums but no movies and fail to see how I have exceeded 20 GB. Rather than investigate the possibility of an error on their part, customer services seemed perfectly happy that I go elsewhere despite my misplaced customer loyalty for over eight years. It would appear they are throttling bandwidth well below their advertised "fair usage allowance" so they can fit more and more users on their network. There are so many ISPs offering unlimited downloads at a lower price than Eclipse only a fool would choose one of their packages. I have paid the price for my foolishness but have redressed the error and left Eclipse for good.

I went with these people as I have been with them for several years. I moved house recently and somehow they didn't notify BT (or something) so I am still waiting for my line to be activated. I would find someone else but I fear that might be out of the frying pan into the fire

We signed up over the phone - the service sounded great, impressed by Which? review, very helpful salesperson, UK-based call centre. We were advised to go for 10GB monthly limit which proved woefully inadequate. (We had used this within a few days.) Told we could upgrade at any time, but this was untrue - we had to wait a month and spent 3.5 weeks having to pay for extra limit so that we could continue to use it in that first month. (Advice: don't trust their estimate unless you are a very light internet user.)

Spent hours on the phone trying to get situation resolved but could never get through to the right person. They took lots of messages but no-one ever phoned me back. After a month, had to upgrade to next band (50GB) but this proved too low for us as well (family of 4 plus working from home). The speed was usually fairly reasonable (slightly better than previous supplier but still only 3Mbps at best) but service dropped out frequently and was often unusable during late evening.

We have now moved to BT Infinity now that it is available and we have completed the 18 month tie-in to Eclipse - finally, we have fast broadband that JUST WORKS, without all the hassle we have had from Eclipse. The transfer was completed smoothly using MAC address provided by Eclipse. However, Eclipse are still trying to bill us for a service we no longer have - in fact they owe us some money having overcharged us before I cancelled the direct debit. Despite 2 people in Eclipse confirming that the account is closed, their credit control dept do not seem to think so.

Perhaps we have just been unlucky but I would not have broadband from Eclipse again if they were the only supplier left.

Been with Eclipse for many years and can't fault the product or the service.