Vodafone Prepay Free Calls & Texts – It pays to ask questions heres why?

vodafone logo

vodafone logoVodafone is my current mobile phone provider and I have been using their “Prepay Free Calls & Texts” option by topping up by €20 per month. So this option allows me to call another 087 number for free and send free text as long as I top up by €20 per month or so I thought? What didn’t occur to me was if one one of my contacts had changed their network but kept their 087 number prefix I would be charged for the call or to put it better how can I know if my 087 contact was on another network?

I called customer support and explained the problem and was informed that if I call a contact that appears as a Vodafone 087 user but on another network eg. O2, Meteor, 3network etc. I would here a short “Beep” just before the connection was made, basically to let me know I will be charged for the call. Interesting that this little trick is not publicly known nor is it available on their website. Make’s me wonder how many other people on this pay plan are getting screwed for perceived free 087 to 087 network calls…

The support guy did actually list 6 of my contacts who were on different networks but still holding their 087 numbers but if I hadn’t asked I would never have known. To finish up with I asked support if I could access this information on the Vodafone website and was told “NO”

Update on Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Problems

In my last post I mentioned about problems connecting to my own blog from my home broadband connection with Imagine/Gaelic Telecom. Although it is now fixed I am still having problems accessing my friend Robert’ Sweetnam’s Blog. I am accessing his blog through proxify.com its the only way at the moment – I rang Gaelic Telecom/Imagine support again last Friday night complaining about not been able to view his site.

I was asked if I have “Content Filtering” enabled which I said no and his reply was “Well I really haven’t got a clue why you cannot access http://blog.sweetnam.eu” he went on to say “I will send a ticket up to tech support and see what they say” he also asked me for my mobile number so a “techy” could ring me back within the hour, but as expected I was left still waiting on the call.

Monday morning came and lo and behold I got a call back from Gareth “the techy guy” at Imagine Telecom Support. He said they were still looking into the problem and that he would call me back before the end of working day. He also suggested that they change my IP address as that would surely fix the problem, I said no to the IP change and left them to it but hence to say I got no call back.

Left it stew for Tuesday….

This morning Wednesday I called back support went through the whole “rigga’ ma’ roll” (procedure) again with general support and demanded some answers by today. An hour later Gareth called back with the solution of changing my IP and I quote what he said…

“It appears that you turned off “Content Filtering” back in June 2006 (which I did) but it seems it didn’t go through properly. You were going through a proxy server where your content was been cached, to help speed an stuff.”

So Robert was right as mentioned here  “they” could track my where abouts if they wanted to!

Back to the solution… I caved to the IP change in the end and was supplied with a new IP address over the phone. I went home reset my router, flushed the dns, cleared my cache etc. re-booted and opened up Firefox typed in http://blog.sweetnam.eu and guess what?

No F**king joy!

Back to the idiots again tomorrow to tell ’em to shove their solution up the highest part of their holes.

Connection Problem On My Own Website – Imagine / Gaelic Telecom

Gaelic TelecomI haven’t been able to connect to my own website with over 2 weeks, I could ftp or use a proxy server and that was fine but no browser connection with either FireFox or Internet Explorer.

By the way my broadband connection is with Gaelic Telecom who are a white label for Imagine so on Friday night last I called support and ran through the usual things with them but no luck, the following night still no feedback from support so I decided to try a different route. I used the ip address to access my site with a forward slash tilde /~ and username and it worked this is what I used: http://64.191.9.37/~kmcgrap this auto redirected me to http://lonestar.kjbserve.com/~kmcgraph/ and I was able to view the website.

The strange thing is that when I tried the url http://www.kmcgraphics.com everything worked. Its like it updated DNS or something.

I don’t know if this was the solution or just coincidence but it worked for me.

Anyway if your interested below this is the email I sent to support@imagine.ie followed by the reply I received this morning. I’m hoping this post might help others out there if they have stumbled upon the same problem.

Email sent to Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Support

Hello,

My Internet Connection is fine but I’m just having problems connecting to ONE site http://www.kmcgraphics.com

I’m running Windows XP Professional SP2. with browsers IE7 & Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8

Measures I have taken so far:

1. Cleared Internet Cache and Cookies.
2. Rebooted router and computer.
3. Tried accessing it in different browsers. (IE7 & Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8)

Some Observations:
1. I can access the site through a proxy server fine.

Other steps taken:

Command prompt:

ipconfig /flushdns

Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

I have done a Tracert from command prompt as follws with the results below:

tracert www.kmcgraphics.com

Tracing route to www.kmcgraphics.com [64.191.9.37]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.254
2 26 ms 25 ms 27 ms lns2.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.25]
3 22 ms 63 ms 24 ms ve5.core.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.129]
4 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms ge0-0.border2.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.2]
5 26 ms 29 ms 25 ms ge-1-0-0.32.mpr2.dub1.ie.gvnx.net [217.112.145.1
1]
6 26 ms 24 ms 24 ms 67.17.193.45
7 106 ms 106 ms 108 ms 67.17.108.58
8 106 ms 105 ms 105 ms hostnoc.demarc.gblx.net [64.214.106.38]
9 1050 ms 113 ms 112 ms ge2-oc48-1-0-ctsi.rtr0.scr1.hostnoc.net [66.197.
191.34]
10 112 ms 111 ms 113 ms www.kmcgraphics.com [64.191.9.37]

Trace complete.

Also tried to ping:

ping www.kmcgraphics.com
Ping request could not find host www.kmcgraphics.com. Please check the name and
try again.

And finally the usual error response from the browser window:

The requested URL could not be retrieved

——————————————————————————–

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.kmcgraphics.com/

The following error was encountered:

Unable to determine IP address from host name for www.kmcgraphics.com
The dnsserver returned:

Server Failure: The name server was unable to process this query.
This means that:

The cache was not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL.
Check if the address is correct.

Your cache administrator is support@imagine.ie.

——————————————————————————–

Generated Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:55:01 GMT by filter6.int.imagine.ie (squid/2.6.STABLE13)

Can you please advise on what to do here, I can access www.kmcgraphics.com from any other computer not from my home connection with no problem.
Is there possibly a dns cache problem with my connection and filter6.int.imagine.ie ?

Hope to hear soon,

Kieran McCarthy

Response back from Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Support

Hi Kieran

All of the filter servers now have the IP address for this host, but it seems that filter6 did not have it at the time you had the problem. We’ve no known problem with DNS at the moment.

This could have been a once-off problem, or it may happen again; if it does, then email us again and we’ll look into it again as quickly as possible.

We would suspect this to have been something to do with the DNS for that domain, rather than being a filtering problem here or being a imagine dns problem.

Imagine Support