(Article Sunday Tribune) Broadband blues

bealtine

A small piece from Brian Carey, not normally noted for his critique of "profitable" companies. Seems to be a sketchy but a reasonably fair analysis

Broadband blues

One wonders if eircom has recovered from the week long bashing it received from RTE on its broadband rollout. Eircom commercial director David Mc Redmond scored when he thanked RTE for passing on the 12 complaints the station had received over the previous weekend. Ouch!
Undeterred, the national broadcaster ploughed on and into the former state telecom company. By the end of the week, the folder was probably somewhat bigger.
It is pretty embarassing for an IDA business park in Bray not to have a broadband connection. Or a businness premises in Dublin 2.The percieved wisdom is that eircom is holding back funds to pay dividends to its shareholders rather than invest in broadband and a lack of investment in the past is responsible.Eircom will spend 200m on its network this year. The way regulation is set up here, eircom sets prices on the basis of return on investment. If it invested more then it would charge more. Perverse but true.
Comparison with Northern Ireland has not flattered. In the north,there is a full commitment for full broadband access by the end of next year largely because the British government paid to bring the technology to inaccessabile areas.
The government here decided to build its own fibre rings or Metropolitan Area Networks(MAN) in mojor cities instead. It is no secret that eircom views these MANs , built at a cost of 37 Million, as a monumental waste of money and an unnecessary duplication of infrastructure.
Government views them as a necessary piece of infrastructure to allow rival operators to by-pass eircom and supply directly to consumers. Competition will drive broadband. It will be interesting to see which theory is right.
So stands the broadband debate, all pitch black or pearly white. BT, flagged in some quarters here as a gold standard for broadband, suffered enormous criticism when it started introducing the new technology in 2001.
And therein lies the rub, eircom's real sin is that it should have rolled out basic, plain vanilla much earlier- its original proposal included an application for a broadcast licence. The company really, really has to get its customer service in gear.

(c) The Sunday Tribune

Jammer

i live in dub 15, it took them 2 years to give me a phone line, i don't think i'll have broadband this side of 2010!