Dempsey will talk to Eircom on broadband

thund3rbird_

from http://www.rte.ie/business/2004/1124/businesstonight.html

Minister Noel Dempsey says he is willing to talk to the industry on broadband but is not willing to divert money from other projects

Eircom has set what it claims is an aggressive target to get 500,000 broadband connections into Irish homes and businesses by the end of 2007. That timescale does not represent the target the Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey wants. Last month he said the industry should reach the 500,000 customer target a full 12 months earlier, by the end of 2006. Meanwhile, Eircom says it can provide broadband availability to 90% of the country by March 2007. It wants the Government to intervene to bring the final 10%, thinly populated rural areas, into the broadband picture.



..... & the wait goes on

Ciaran500

That all sounds impressive but what does he mean by "broadband availability to 90%". If he means 90% of exchanges upgraded this doesn't take into the account the huge amount of line falures through out the country.

SkepticOne

thund3rbird_ wrote:

..... & the wait goes on

People used to attribute the problem of broadband in Ireland to Eircom's monopoly. Why, if Eircom are making money out of ISDN, dial-up and so forth, would they bother with broadband in the absence of competition?

Now, presumably thanks to Eircom's PR department, the problem is increasingly percieved as being due to the lack of government funding to prop up Eircom's monopoly.

If you look at Eircom' PR output over the last year or so a few patterns emerge.

1. "We are leading the way with broadband. We are building 'Broadband Ireland'".

2. "The Government should stop funding things like the MANs. What is the point of duplicating infrastructure that is already there."

3. "We would like to do more, but we need help from the tax-payer"

What is remarkable is the extent to which these blatently self-serving messages have sunk in to the public consciousness. David McRedmond, although he gets a knocking on this forum, is surely deserving of the millions he has been paid by the Eircom shareholders.

I was going to pick apart each of the PR messages above, but I think people can see that each of them is simply a way of increasing Eircom's dominance; a dominance which, not too long ago, meant that they could get hundreds of euros out of a single customer a month for plain dial-up or ISDN internet access. After all, where were people going to go if they weren't happy? Eircom have spun it in such a way that people now believe that future improvements involve increasing that dominance.

A few external developments have meant that Eircom can no longer make hundreds out of ISDN and dial-up anymore and this has led to some improvement in the larger urban areas. However, the sort of situation that we read about in Sweden and other countries goes much further than this, and involves the sort of measures from the government that Eircom (naturally enough) vehemently opposes. Yet Eircom's PR machine has been so succesful, that we often find people criticising Eircom while at the same time going along with their PR message.

Eircom have effectively steered the terms of the debate in their own favour and now almost everyone sees things in terms of Eircom sales (e.g Eircom DSL penetration), Eircom DSL availability, Eicom dominance and monopoly, etc.

Big P

Well said SkepticOne. Couldnt agree more.