[Irish Times] Comreg outlines targets for 2006

damien

Feels like 2001 all over again

Comreg outlines targets for 2006
Marc Coleman, Economics Editor

Comreg's strategic targets for 2006 will focus on pushing the expansion of broadband throughout Ireland by facilitating local loop unbundling, according to its chairperson Isolde Goggin.

The communications regulator will also concentrate on monitoring technological change in the telecommunications industry and on strengthening consumer awareness on pricing. Comreg was established in 2002 with statutory powers to regulate the telecommunications industry.

Ms Goggin said that competitively priced broadband availability was essential to maintaining Ireland's competitiveness, but could not be achieved without progress on local loop unbundling (LLU). She said some progress had been made in relation to LLU access pricing, but maintained that further progress was needed. "The lack of a functioning process is clearly disappointing. Recent progress on some elements of the process at an industry-wide level needs to be built upon in tandem with the developments in other platforms, if we are to build the momentum needed for Ireland to move up the 'league table'.

"Technological change is altering the industry and Comreg will have to achieve a common understanding with industry players if it is to avoid inappropriate regulation, she said. "The development of competing platforms is very encouraging. Wireless broadband usage has risen by 2,000 per cent in the past year. Technological change takes three years to filter down to the mass market, but we can already understand how core changes will affect the market."

In 2005 Comreg launched a website to provide consumers with information on charge tariffs for mobile phone packages. Comreg aims to extend this facility in 2006. "To date there have been over 50,000 hits on the website. In the first half of 2006 it will be further developed to cover fixed and broadband communications as well," she said.

Ms Goggin said that the radio spectrum - which is used to allocate frequencies for a variety of telecommunications service providers - needed to be allocated more efficiently.

The EU group on Spectrum Management is assessing the traditional method of licensing the spectrum to examine how market mechanisms could contribute to its more efficient usage. Ms Goggin said that Ireland had relatively high spectrum availability because of its peripheral location and that a more flexible licensing system could help to attract foreign telecommunications operators to locate here.

eircomtribunal

In 2005 Comreg launched a website to provide consumers with information on charge tariffs for mobile phone packages. Comreg aims to extend this facility in 2006. "To date there have been over 50,000 hits on the website. In the first half of 2006 it will be further developed to cover fixed and broadband communications as well," she said.

Statements like these need scrutinising. They could easily be a means to bull**** the public. 50 000 hits to date?
What is a hit? How many genuine users have gone through the tariff evaluation process? What percentage of mobile users is that?

To date Irish mobile tariffs are deliberately and artfully designed to confuse the consumer, not seldom terms (like flat rate in the case of O2) are misleadingly used to con the consumer; in fact there is a plethora of details I could point out how tariff information is given in a way that would not stand up in many other countries.
ComReg's mobile tariff website is an expensive sticky tape, a fig leave, that does not help t h e mobile user.

P.

lucernarian

Nice sound bite from ComReg, that's all. No guarantees to either me as a consumer or the industry as a whole that the various issues plaguing broadband in this country will be remedied in any way. But what we will have is even more information on the prices we pay for broadband in Ireland:rolleyes:

viking

Comreg's strategic targets for 2006 will focus on pushing the expansion of broadband throughout Ireland by facilitating local loop unbundling, according to its chairperson Isolde Goggin.

*yawn*

To date there have been over 50,000 hits on the website.

I think someone in Comreg's IT dept. has been feeding Isolde BS regarding the success of the website or she is fully aware of the sillyness of using "hits" as a metric. A hit is a request for a file from the web server, including image files and other files (.js and .css files) associated with a single html page that is viewed.

Anyway, its a PR from Comreg with little content and a lot of padding.

paulm17781

viking wrote:

I think someone in Comreg's IT dept. has been feeding Isolde BS regarding the success of the website or she is fully aware of the sillyness of using "hits" as a metric. A hit is a request for a file from the web server, including image files and other files (.js and .css files) associated with a single html page that is viewed.

That's where you're wrong. It's a buzz word that non-techies won't understand.

viking

paulm17781 wrote:

That's where you're wrong. It's a buzz word that non-techies won't understand.

Of course, but is Isolde a "non-techie" who wouldn't understand a hit from a page view and therefore repeated tripe that she was fed?

Some would say that its hard for Comreg to break the habit of a lifetime...

Capt'n Midnight

50,000 Hits !

Wow that's nearly 5% of the number of mobile phones, assuming that no one visited twice and that every visitor went through all the options.

RangeR

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

50,000 Hits !

Wow that's nearly 5% of the number of mobile phones, assuming that no one visited twice and that every visitor went through all the options.

And also that every page view by a visitor is about 10 to 20 hits, depending on the content of said page.

eircomtribunal

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

50,000 Hits !

Wow that's nearly 5% of the number of mobile phones,

We've got much more than a million mobiles by now!
P.

bealtine

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

50,000 Hits !

50,000 slaps to the techie that spat out that line of crud...

vinnyfitz

Was this an interview with Ms Goggin or what? It is very unusual for the IT to run a story like this without mentioning to what it is related. There is nothing on ComReg's site connected to this...

All a bit odd... Also this is not Colman's job. He is their resident economist what does he know about telecomms?

jwt

Continuing in the vein of being nice to Comreg tonight, that is a masterpiece of PR.

An A4 page of text that says nothing concrete, offers nothing new, makes no promises, has nothing measurable, and still sounds like they are really on top of things.

WOW!


That is impressive. Now if we could get the same amount of brain power required to write it applied to ...oh i don't know.......say..........regulating like a regulator should we'd be in great shape.




John

eircomtribunal

Remember the "ComReg wishes all a happy eChristmas shopping" document, in December, where they bragged about the massive €55 million online Christmas shopping expectation, in a senseless and misleading PR Amarach-survey, that gave no indications of the international context of the figures?
Today theRegister mentions the online Christmas shopping figures for the UK. And guess what, they spent over 900% more than the Irish on a per capita comparison. (Can my maths be correct? Ireland is 1/15th of UK pop;5 billion sterling = €7,422,216,508)

The company estimates shoppers spent almost £5bn in the 10 weeks to Christmas compared to £3.33bn during the same period last year.
These latest figures cap off yet another good 12 months for online sales, with IMRG describing 2005 as a "year of remarkable dynamic growth for UK online shopping".
Over the past 12 months, UK consumers spent £19.2bn on goods and services - 32 per cent more than in 2004. Researchers reckon that 24 million UK shoppers bought something online last year, spending, on average, £816 each.

P.