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UPC HAS ANNOUNCED a record 13 per cent year-on-year growth in it service subscriptions in 2011.
It saw 100,800 new subscriptions to its broadband, phone and digital television services last year.
The greatest growth was seen in its phone services, at a 68 per cent. This was followed by 28 per cent year-on-year increase in broadband subscriptions and a 1 per cent growth in digital TV customers.
Dana Strong, CEO of UPC Ireland, described it as “one of Ireland’s leading multinational partners”.
Our strategy is to offer superb products and this is clearly resonating as we gained over 100,000 subscriptions to digital TV, broadband and phone in 2011. We’re delighted that we are meeting our customers’ expectations and they have rewarded us with their custom, which we are very pleased to acknowledge. We can look forward to further progress and development in 2012.
The business says the overall stimulus for growth remains with the group’s sustained investments over six years in Next Generation Infrastructure reaching €500 million at year end.
UPC provides direct employment to 845 people and more than 1,000 jobs via sub contractors.
During 2011, the company recruited a further 90 people to fill positions across customer services, sales, administration and managerial roles.
The company revenue grew by 16 per cent last year. In 2011, it added a new remote record function to its TV service, as well as the channels Food Network and True Movies.
Earlier this month, UPC was ordered to drop the ‘fastest broadband’ claim from its adverts, after a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority Ireland by Magnet Networks, another broadband provider.
The UPC said that its service was being advertised to the mass market.
The ASAI upheld Magnet’s complaint, saying that while UPC’s offerings were the fastest services to the majority of Irish homes, it was inappropriate to make an absolute claim when other providers – including those who were not accessible to the mass market – had faster services.
Their customer service is terrible.
In fairness to them their customer service has improved dramatically from where it was. Always room for improvement though!
I found them reasonably good actually. Vodafone broadband was the previous one to compare with, mind:-)
They are light years ahead in offering compared to DSL broadband providers.
The quality of their TV is appalling and their customer service matches it very well. They certainly retain their Cablelink legacy. Really dreadful all round.
I wonder how many of their customers have been with them for longer than 1 year?
The UPC service has improved hugely in the last year or so! However their bills are still nearly impossible to understand! You might as well be looking at something written inside a Pyramid!!
Yep I agree that their customer service is poor. Try ringing it n your on hold forever, then ring their sales line and your answered straight away! Plus €72 a month for tv(no sky movies/sport) n broadband is expensive!
I’ve been with them a couple of years, moved from sky (robbing bastards)! Anyway I actually think the customer service is fairly decent, much better than I was expecting! The only problem I have is that the tv box is woeful, keeps stalling and resetting!
It looks again as if there is a pr campaign being run on these comments. Strange unlikely patterns. Would ordinary people come out in support of UPC. It’s very unlikely, defying the usual pattern of comments. Look at any other story on th journal and you won’t see the spikes that occur when a campaign is being orchestrated. I’ll say it again UPC.s tv quality and customer service is appalling.
upc has great costumer service i think, i`ve been with them 13 months now and the bill is always exactly what i am expecting. i genuinely never have any issues with them. by the way i don`t work for them or have no personal ties with them. after dealing with eircom i think upc are a god send ! having an account with eircom was like having a raffel every month to see what numbers they were charging me this month !
Their broadband packages are great compared to the Eircom offering. Have never had to call their customer service.
I had 50mb UPC for a few months and boy do I miss it now. Moved to the south and all I have now is crappy three Internet. Less than 1 mb service and I’m paying just as much. I feel robbed that UPC only seem to cater to certain areas.
Any chance upc can hurry up and come to south west.
I can’t get it cause some jerk off neighbour is blocking them putting up lines. Stuck on woeful Vodafone.
@Aydo I’m on the same boat. But not one neighbour, several.
UPC won’t dig because the council rapes them financially.
The neighbours in question, 2 of em, won’t let UPC run the lines across the house in the air. We have em but no connection to the network. Mare eh.
One neighbour said they could put them underground, which they wouldn’t do. So I’m stuck.
Now can we please have more HD channels?
The difference compared to dsl is night and day and I’m paying less for bb with phone from UPC 16 euros less only 40 a month I was ripped off for too long.
@cpm. you’re right there. have upc broadband myself and it’s great but you’re screwed if anything goes wrong.
Cancelled my upc tv subscription. Only have broadband now. I use netflix and get alot of movies given to me so television subs really isnt needed with 4od,rte player etc. liveonlinefooty does me grand for sports.
Successive governments have promised national fibre based broadband. Ireland of the Smart Economy with mickey mouse broadband infrastructure. Speeds in many areas of even Eastern Europe beat Ireland.
Wow, ‘even Eastern Europe’. Like we’re so First World here!
Don’t you read the government propaganda here? Everything Ireland does is ‘world class’ apparently, apart from broadband, …
Was with them on two separate occasions. Suffice to say, when their salespeople come to my door and I tell them why I won’t sign up, they don’t even try to convince me otherwise. Appalling lack of customer service on both occasions.
Has anybody noticed with UPC fibre that their download bandwidth is doubled when downloading form large corporations such as Microsoft (digital river) electronic arts EA etc…
That’s due to good servers and bandwidth at the other end. I have 100Mb UPC and at this speed I can tell which websites have good bandwidth. Alarming differences between sites.
I got 100 Mbps service from them myself! Wow! Forget Eircom and the rest. Equally when LTE will come in Ireland in 3-5 years we shall have 40-90 Mbps wireless service too
Their 100 Mbps service is fine but bit of cheat too. You don’t need that speed for any standard usage, how websites load up don’t make a difference if you are 5 Mbps or 100 Mbps, Skype does not make difference too. The only usage for 100 Mbps could be full hd streaming, or some heavy downloading from torrents or ftps… But then there is a catch I talk about, their 100 Mbps is limited to 500 GB of data allowance and providing you are utilising full 100 Mbps speed all the time you will be out of monthly allowance in just a rough guess 2 or 3 days. Who is that 100 Mbps service then for? Bit of marketing catch that’s all. Don’t get me wrong it’s still a very good service.
@fizi water – your logic (although correct) is misleading – a faster connection does not download any more data than a slow one. Assuming your surfing habits don’t change when you upgrade you’ll get the same amount of time on your new connection as you had on your old. The only difference will be that files will download quicker.
If you got a full month before you upgraded, you’ll get it after you upgraded.
Their service is really good but customer service terrible, try to send them an email and see if / when you get response and what sort of response. Pretty bad for a business who after all is selling new technologies.
I agree 100mb connections are pointless for standard home use,esp when capped. Its the same as Three offering ‘All you can eat data’ (Capped at 15gb anyhow) on your smartphone when the MAJORITY of users wouldnt EVER even hit 1.5-2gb of data per month and thats with streaming radio & tv on your phone,pure marketing ploy.
I think it’s aimed at people using their phones as a modem … tis handy enough but upc customer service is amazing compared to 3, and that’s not saying much for either of them.
Yep I was bothered to do calculation and UPC 100 meg line with 500 GB cap would be in breach after 11 hours and 22 minutes if downloading full speed non stop – providing ideal conditions. Quite far from 30 days it needs to get you through hah ? :)
Three now charge for tethering so its infact useless for using it as a modem unless you pay outside of your bundle.
How can you say a connection is too fast, and pointless? You don’t need to max out your usage to make it worthwhile. I pay 50eur a month for 100Mb and can download an entire copy of Windows 7 in 3 minutes. A full HD movie in 2 minutes.. It makes a big difference.
Why, oh why won’t you as they say “enter the north west area” because all we get is extorted for a mind numbingly fast 7Mb (not). We as a country lag so far behind our European counterparts in broadband service and pay some of the highest tariffs for s@&€ service…are we mad or whaaa???
I’ve always had great customer service with them. Sent an email about moving house this morning and got a call back about it by lunch time and now everything is sorted.
If there broadband service is anything like their TV service NO THANKS
Constantly freezing, and I live in an area that was recently upgraded so what does that say for their phone/broadband services.
I had the NTL Cable Broadband when I lived in town a few years ago and it was brilliant. Moved out of there to somewhere where I could only get wireless and the difference was crazy. NTL was so much faster.
I have since moved back to an area where I can get UPC Cable broadband and I got it again. Very good service. High speeds, good connections. I can’t complain about them. I’ve never had any outages with them either and I’ve never had to call customer services.
@rathminer: and do you actually achieve 10 Mbps speed when downloading your tv shows ? :)
I very much doubt it.
And you don’t feel cheated with your i7 when you type document because after that you can play games or something and utilize the power of it that you aid for. But if your i7 was only working like i7 for 2 days in the moneth and rest like Pentium 100 :) then you wuld be singing different song. Ok, I probably get another thumb down as whoever thumbs me down cannot understand probably what I say, nevermind ok.
100Mbps actually. And I do, yes. It’s currently clocking at 104Mbps, according to speedtest.net. Downloading a file at the moment at a rate of 13 MEGABYTES per second… and browsing TheJournal while doing so…
There is no point upgrading to 50 mbps with a n class modem if your computer and laptops dont have the capabilities to receive the signal. You will just get the same speed or much slower speeds. Most Laptops and computers have G cards . It would require buying N class USB converter. UPC dont warn you about needing this hardware either. yes if you plug it in by Lan it will work but alot of households want or need wireless.
CPM: yes I know mate that faster connection does not download any more data than slow connection, same as 1 kg of led does not weight any more than 1 kg of feathers :)
My point was that UPC by offering 100 Meg line is using marketing a lot, as that speed is not possible to utilize for average person – websites don’t open any faster on 100 meg line than on 5 meg line, you would book fly ticket same long or you would have same skype conversation. Only when downloading large files, really large files, that matters, but then they give you quite poor 500 gb allowance. I know that 99% people never cross that allowance, but then what they need 100 meg line for, if it’s not for average use and if for heavy use it’s allowance is too small…? Hopefully that makes any sense mate, thanks.
For 50 quid, it’s worthwhile for most average users. Downloading your favourite TV shows in 45 seconds would be a huge convenience for most. One doesn’t need to use the speed at all times, but it’s great to have when it counts. My computer has an intel Core i7 processor, but I don’t feel cheated when I want to merely type a document on it.
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