60 thoughts on “Blueface is crap”

  1. Tom,
    I am curious if Blueface has contacted you as a result of your posts here?
    You would think that someone ‘higher up’ within the company reads your blog or has at least been made aware of your woes and is concerned enough to try and address it with you.
    Perhaps they don’t monitor blogs for mention of themselves.
    Might be an opening to offer your services?
    😉

    Colin

  2. Too bad Tom, What are the alternatives. I think they should have called themselves Redface, or have they no shame 🙂

  4. I’m curious about alternatives too, any feeback on Voip Ireland, Broadtalk or any other provider?

  5. Forget about these VOIP subscriptions fixed to one location/number.
    Just wait untill you can use a dependable mobile VOIP solution through your WiFi enabled mobile…

    E.

  6. I’ve been using http://www.freespeech.ie

    For all I can see, it’s the same service, but a looooot cheaper. I did have a slight quality dip once, but once in 6 months, I’m happy with that.

    Viva la tech.

  7. Thanks everyone for your feedback.

    Freespeech has been mentioned a couple of times as an alternative. I must look into that although given my experience with Blueface, I’ll be very slow to go with a similar service.

    Colin, to answer your question, no. No-one from Blueface has been in touch (they probably tried ringing me!). Given the crap service I have received from them to-date, if I were to take them on as a cient it would have to be on payment in advance terms. They shouldn’t find that hard to swallow, that’s the way they bill me.

  8. Surprised to read this although it has been a while since it was posted, i have used blueface for 2 businesses that I run and have only had one service outage (for a day) in that time. Cost me €600 to set up the 2 companies and our irish and uk calls are paid for a year. certainly beats the €200 a month we were paying eircom.

    Do you think as a early adopter you paid a heavier price than someone who came in later “in the game”?

    Al

  9. I have been with Blueface, over NTL DSL connection for just over a year…i have never had any problems at all with my service, thanks to them i was able to give Eircom the finger for once and for all.
    When i signed up initially i mailed in a couple of queries which were all respnded to the same day.
    I was very impressed with them…

  10. Hi – just to clarify we did contact Tom a number of times. We advised him that he needed to make some changes on his router on account of his particular setup. He decided that he didn’t require our advice however and never implemented the changes. Despite our looking at his account and seeing his device drop its registration as we predicted, Tom still refused to make the changes. I personally contacted him to offer support and was met with a number of sarcastic and cynical (many would say downright childish) replies. Feargal.

  12. Hi Tom,

    Are you prioritising SIP traffic on your internet connection? It could also be your ISP causing this issue as apposed to blue face. Some of them are de-prioritising SIP traffic to cause issues for VOIP providers to make sure they don’t loose telecoms revenue themselves. Something to think about anyway.

    Paul

  13. Paul,

    thanks for the suggestions. I was prioritising SIP on my router but to no avail.

    Paul, this post is well over a year old (Oct 06)- I’m not sure why Feargal chose now to revisit this with his bizarre comments. I hope he is ok.

  14. Feargal,

    Just to clarify, the only suggestion Blueface made to me was to set up port forwarding. I did this to no avail (as noted in my email to you of 11-Oct-2006).

    You offered to send me a New ATA to try out. I replied on the 12-Oct-2006 accepting your offer of a new ATA but am still waiting to receive it.

    Please forward evidence of other explanations you gave me or any “sarcastic and cynical (many would say downright childish) replies” you received from me.

    In the absence of the above, feel free to apologise for such outrageous and unfounded slurs.

  15. Tom – you were rude and abusive to our support staff. You did not know how to set up port forwarding on your router – when we offered assistance it was declined – disdainfully is being polite. In summary you decided to ignore our help and when your service didn’t work you complained that it was our fault that you wouldn’t take our advice. There was nothing for us to do but leave it at that. Interestingly I had a call from another company who also suffered similar abuse from you in similar circumstances – seems you’re building up quite a reputation.

    Regards
    Feargal

  16. Feargal,

    I was never rude or abusive to any of your support staff – please back this up with proof or retract it and apologise.

    Again, I set up port forwarding long before I had any of the issues with the unreliable Blueface offering. I mentioned this to you in my email of 11-Oct-2006 and to Sean O’Cathain on both May 11th 2006 and 22nd March 2006.

    Feargal, you might want to stop and consider for a second if it is really appropriate for the CEO of a company to be engaging in unfounded allegations on the web.

    You are embarrassing yourself and the Blueface brand in doing so.

  17. I have to agree with Tom. This is not the place where you want to have this discussion. Blueface would do better to talk with Tom offline and come to an agreement.

    Angry customers can sometimes be irate. They have that liberty. How well you deal with the problem is a measure of how professional your company is. The bar appears to be set low at BlueFace.

  18. “Interestingly I had a call from another company who also suffered similar abuse from you in similar circumstances – seems you’re building up quite a reputation.” – if you want a giggle read that sentence in the voice of Agent Smith from The Matrix…
    “Seems you’re building up quite a reputation, Mr. Anderson… er Raftery

  22. Actually, I don’t know that it is deliberate so perhaps it would be more accurate to say Feargal is, at the very least, mistaken.

  25. Hi,
    I have been usuing Blueface for a while now and I have to admit I have been always very pleased with their services. I use My SIP Switch as well, which they designed and provide for free.

    I suppose, you have been unlucky at their very beginning. I guess that their system at that time was not a strong and reliable as it is today.

    Don’t be to hard on them 😉

  26. BLUEFACE are great!!!!
    EIRCOM are shite theiving bastards with a monopoly on phone and broadband…wht pay line rental to them?
    BLUFACE have saved me from them. I have been with them for a year, set up in five minutes via my NTL DSL…never had a problem since then…find something else to bitch about. If you dont like blueface switch to another provide, its that sinmple, or get a job where you dont have so much free time on your hands…

  27. Tom – you had not set up port forwarding on your router – as I mentioned, you did not know how to set it up and our offer to assist you was declined. Hence your calls failed as we told you they would, and now you are happy to make out that this is our fault.

    Sometimes Tom the best way to sort a problem out is to listen to support staff instead of assuming that you know more than they do.

    Finally, I agree with the post above regarding carrying on this discussion online, however it was Tom who turned it into a limbo dancing contest.

    Feargal

  29. @Feargal Brady – Either put up or shut up! I have email trails which show that I had port forwarding set up in March of 06, a full 7 months before this post and before you contacted me advising me to set up port forwarding.

    Sometimes Feargal the best way to resolve an issue is to actually read your email.

    Feargal, this thread was essentially dead for a good 14 months before you came back here stirring it up again.

  30. Tom – you don’t know how to set up port forwarding – I’ve read the mails, read our support tickets, spoken to our support staff. But thank you for showing us all your true character.

    Feargal

  31. Feargal,

    I don’t know who was right or who was wrong about the technical issues. I do know a thing or two about treating customers (even upset customers who complain in public) with respect.

    Your proper response would be to come onto this comment thread humbly and tell Tom that you are sorry that it didn’t work out for him and give him a number to call if he wants to try again anew. If Tom continued to attack the company after your polite message, that would shed a different light on him.

    It appears that you found this complaint through a search and decided to verbally thrash him. That’s not good business.

    Keep in mind that it takes two to “limbo dance” and it is in the best interest of your company that it’s representatives do not attack customers like you do here.

    I certainly wouldn’t expect to pick up any potential customers who stumble upon this via a Google search.

    Humility is the most important business tool that you can possess.

    – Steve

  32. Thanks Steve,

    I wouldn’t mind but Feargal responded to me privately referencing this blog post back in 2006.

    His sudden unprovoked outbursts in the last couple of weeks are inexplicable as well as inaccurate.

  33. Like others I’m surprised at the comments made by Feargal, so much so that i would wonder/query if they are genuine. Are we sure someone isnt just posing as him. Either way the responses are a shame

  38. It appears that he does post to other boards (http://news.enterprise-ireland.com/read/messages?id=10898). I’m convinced that it is truely the CEO of Blueface.

    I am easy to Google to see if I’m a breathing human. 🙂 I have a unique enough last name.

    I only contribute to this thread in hopes that I could restore some sanity to the situation. I keep up on it because I’ve been treated this badly by companies before and think that every potential customer should see how the CEO of BlueFace is treating this poor customer.

    This is classic defamation in the grossest sense. I don’t care how good a company’s products are, I would never do business with them if I saw that this is the official way that they operate at the CEO level!

    – Steve

    – Steve

  39. Quote:
    “Steve – I contacted Tom a number of times and each time my attempts to resolve the situation were met with disdain.”

    I understand that and from the sounds of this thread, he very well could have been upset at you enough for this to be true. My point is that you should have just left it at that. By flaming him openly here, you have subjected your company to a negative light and confirmed his original post.

    Perhaps they just do business differently in Ireland? I doubt it.

  41. Hey Tom,

    It may well be ironic but it proves my point about eircom having a monopoly. unfortunately i cannot dictate who my employers lease their ip addresses from…
    All im saying is Blueface offer an cheap easy to use alternative to people who dont feel they should have pay eircom line rental 🙂

  42. The point i am trying to get across to you is why not just drop it and switch to another provider? If i am unhappy with a service (where possible) i find an alternative…there is no better way to get your point across to a company than to take your custom and money elsewhere.

  44. I don’t think that the debate was whether a CEO should respond online … at least that wasn’t what I was debating.

    It was WHAT was said online that triggered my interest and responses. Perhaps I just was not clear enough.

    I think that it’s a duty of a CEO to respond to things like this in the public eye. You need to do it tactfully and professionally, though. This is where the CEO of Blueface fell down.

    – Steve

  45. I’ve blueface. Don’t make a lot of calls but its handy using on on the N95 when away.

    Hwoever I’ve setup port forwarding on my router as per all the lovingly written instructions but still every few days I get “SIP registration failed”.

    The Blueface forum is informative and generally very helpful. I do note that they can get cranky if they feel their service is being “dissed” in any fashion.

    This tetchiness seems to be a facet of popular IT startups who have gained a following but don’t fully realise that the time comes when they have to deal professionally with their customers. WHen UTV started out in the ISP business they were the bees knees and resolved problems quickly, tweaked modem banks etc and took a lot of business from eircom. Then they grew and service slowly began to go on a par with eircom and worse they started getting tetchy and ignoring queries on fora that they used frequent. Now – well they’re just as unresponsive as anyone.

    Sometimes I wonder is it because techies who’ve founded a business are suddenly thrust into public facing roles for which they don’t really have the skills – maybe they should hire non-technical folk for roles that make public announcements ?

  47. “Interestingly I had a call from another company who also suffered similar abuse from you in similar circumstances”. Classy! Of course we don’t know the name of the company, but I have to believe him now. He had a call! Tom could be the worst customer and the biggest a**hole in the Earth, but is that the idea of customer service for Blueface? Try to defame the customer claiming, very generically, that he has a bad reputation? In his own blog? Wow, I work for customer service myself here in Cork, and I have few bad examples from my personal experience, but this post is a gem. Please Mr. Brady, don’t leave us now, I’m really curious to see how it will end.

  48. My God Mr. Raferty. You have a lot of time on your hands. What a spiteful little man you are.

  49. i spent more money on my mobile trying to get answer from helpless and incompetent blueface support than i would with eircom landline.

  50. BLUEFACE rocks….
    I have been with then two years now, never had a problem, installed my wireless handset in five minutes on my NTL DSL. I have only has to contact customer support once (via e-mail), and i got a reply and solution in 20 minutes.
    Obviously you spent more money on your mobile to Blueface that you would on an eircom line, mobile operators charge more if you have eircom, why call a customer support number on your mobile. That just shows a lack of intelligence. I live an eircom free life, thanks to Blueface…..no line rental, no overcharging for calls and no unpleasant rude calls to customer support who put you on hold and hope you hang up. I work in IT and a lot of my work comes from eircom customers who signed up for eircom wireless broadband. The minute you sign up and pay, eircom no longer provide support, they leave furious customers with no support at all in setting up wireless
    broadband but will still charge them for the ‘service’. They are a shower of theiving useless dicks, thanks to their monopoly on the lines, irish broadband services are years behind the rest of europe.
    EIRCOM SUCK – Boycott the bastards and sign up to BLUEFACE.

  51. LOL,

    “Eamonn”, if that is your name. You say you work in IT. You say you “live an Eircom free life, thanks to Blueface…” and yet you posted this comment (and your previous one from ip Address 86.43.91.91

    A quick lookup of that address tields the following info:
    % This is the RIPE Whois query server #1.
    % The objects are in RPSL format.
    %
    % Rights restricted by copyright.
    % See http://www.ripe.net/db/copyright.html

    % Information related to ‘86.40.0.0 – 86.43.255.255’

    inetnum: 86.40.0.0 – 86.43.255.255
    netname: EIRCOM
    descr: eircom Ltd
    descr: IP network infrastructure
    descr: Ireland
    descr: ** Send spam/hack/virus complaints to abuse@eircom.net
    descr: ** Complaints sent to the contacts listed below will not be
    descr: ** acted on!
    country: IE
    admin-c: EN369-RIPE
    admin-c: AOR1-RIPE
    tech-c: EN369-RIPE
    tech-c: AOR1-RIPE
    status: ASSIGNED PA
    mnt-by: TE-MNT
    notify: networks@eircom.net
    changed: aoreilly@eircom.ie 20050412
    changed: ross@eircom.net 20060125
    source: RIPE

    Hmmmm, not so Eircom free after all, eh Eamonn?

    For the record, while I lived in Ireland, I had an Eircom 3mb business dsl connection and while I agree that it is overpriced (€40 plus vat plus line rental per month) you are absolutely incorrect to say they leave customers with no support – on the very odd occasion that I had to ring Eircom support they were fantastic. The support technicians always answered, they did their utmost to resolve the issue there and then. If they said they would ring you back. They did.

    Blueface support on the other hand was appalling. The phone was rarely answered. Instead it diverted to an answering maching where you were asked to leave your details and someone would call you back. Often they did ring back but it was usually over 24 hours later (and on one accasion 3 days later).

    Then Blueface CEO Fergal Brady is a complete loon. He lies about his former customers, he slanders them in public fora, he is THE most unprofessional person I have come across in any company in Ireland (and that is saying a lot).

    Avoid Blueface (at least until they fire Fergal Brady and fix their appalling infrastructure).

  52. Jesus ‘Tom The Slanderer’, you realy are one sad bitter little man.
    Two years later and you are still bitching about Blueface, have you ever heard the expression ‘to shop around’, its what people do if they are not happy with a service, they find an alternative. The fact you have not done this yet would indicate there is no good alternative to Blueface.
    And mister smarty pants, how pathetic is it to point out again that my work ip is eircom, you pointed this out a year ago and told me how ironoic it is…well what is even more ironic is that you are repeating yourself again, and again and again on every topic, change the record and stop behaving like a three year old. My work and my home are two completley different places, at home i can choose, and i choose Blueface.
    By the way, the LOL at the start of your reply above, did you really LOL at that precise moment or is it just one of those stupid noncensical LOL’s that dorks like you add randomly to all e-mails and blogs to try and appear more cool and hip??? It doesn’t work.
    Yes Eamonn is my real name, as per all my previous posts why would i hide my name from a sap like you. As long as you don’t have number and start calling me, i have nothing to fear. However if i thought you had my number i would be very scared…you seem to be a bit like a crazy fixated stalker…I i was CEO of Blueface, i’d have a big flashing light linked to you number and any time you called id mess with your head, i bet you are realy easy to wind up till you get your knickers in such a twist you cant walk, LOL YASUDH IWLTKYA

  53. Rofl,

    ‘Eamon’ I’m a crazy fixated stalker? Lol!!!

    You are the one who keeps coming back to my site to post about Blueface. If anyone is a stalker, it is you.

    Frankly I had completely forgotten about Blueface until you popped along to post about it here again. If anyone is fixated…

    As for shopping around, I have much better solutions than Blueface. Ones which work on my mobile and landline and which have support and whose CEO’s have a clue.

  54. For such a grumpy moaning minny you sure do LOL and ROFL LMAO a lot…but its no substitute for the real thing…lighten up and try it some time, virtual laughter is crap.

  56. Hi Tom,

    This is written back in 2006 I think it is time to take it down and move on !!

    I have used blueface for my compnay which has 4 phones and never had a days trouble over the last 2 years

    Thanks David

    1. Hi David,

      thanks for stopping by and commenting.

      I moved on long ago, don’t worry, however I see no reason to take the post down. To do so is to re-write history. It happened. The CEO lied. It is a matter of record.

      To remove it is to say it never happened.

  57. No thank you tom, your great

    Maybe IT is not your bag… back to plants then I take it ?

    1. See,

      when people who want to defend Blueface resort to unprovoked lies (not you David, the CEO), sarcasm and insults (that’s you David), it just confirms that there is something very wrong with the company.

      Btw, whatever happened your davesrants.com site?

  58. I know this post is years old now.

    I work for one of Bluefaces competitors (goldfish.ie) and I’ve just read your post listing your dialog with Blueface regarding your issue.

    Just in case anyone experiences the same symptoms that you did, I thought I’d post so they know what the actual issue is.

    It looks to me like your original problem was caused by something called SIP ALG running on your router. In essence, some routers try to ‘help’ with SIP signalling traffic by modifying the packets. In some cases, this can be destructive and usually results in registrations dropping. Restarting equipment fixes it for a while, but it can soon recur.

    Many providers, such as ourselves, offer their services on an alternative port number which you can configure on your phone or ATA – Doing so stops the router from identifying the traffic as SIP and hence trying to modify it. You can find out more about this issue on our help guide (http://www.goldfish.ie/89133/all/1/Change-the-port-numbers-your-phone-uses.aspx)

    Port forwarding will rarely fix the issue as the router generally still sees the traffic as SIP.

    I hope that anyone reading your post realises that not all VoIP providers are the same and that VoIP can actually do some great things for you/your business.

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