Dempsey interviewed by ENN

damien

Full interview here: http://www.enn.ie/frontpage/news-9710965.html


ENN: On that point of working together, there are some lobby groups concerned with broadband such as ALTO, IrelandOffline, and ComWreck. In a recent speech delivered in Galway you said a lot of criticism of broadband failure was damaging to our international reputation. Are you still of the belief these groups are damaging Ireland's international reputation because of their criticism of broadband availability?

Minister Dempsey:

I think totally unbalanced and negative comments in relation to broadband is damaging to Ireland because it is totally unbalanced. For example, I had some correspondence from one of those groups -- I'm not going to say which -- telling me I was "burying my head in the sand" and [saying] that everything is all right, and that we shouldn't be critical of you or what's happening with broadband, you're-not-going-to-silence-us type of thing, which is a load of nonsense. Anybody that read the [Galway] speech would see that it was very well balanced, and said that we were making progress, and I can very justifiably say we are making very significant progress, but I also said "I'm not satisfied; we have a good bit further to go, we need to be more aggressive in the way we're doing things." [I complained about] the question of a lack of balance, not the fact that people are critical.

There was an article that I took pen to paper to respond to in one of the Sunday newspapers comparing us to Ethiopia. I mean, we're not as good as we should be, we're not as good as we could be, but comparing us to a country with 0.1 percent penetration of broadband doesn't do Ireland any good, and these things are picked up whether people believe it or not. They are picked up by our competitors, and I've no doubt that [article] winged itself around some of the larger companies in the US that might be thinking of investing abroad and investing in Ireland, and it was used to try and damage Ireland.

All I'm asking for is balance. I'm not asking for people to come out and say everything is great. I think it is good that we have criticism; I think it's good people want to try and keep me on my toes, and the telecommunication companies on their toes, but don't be making us out to be a Third World country.

dahamsta

Dialup Dempsey wrote:

...don't be making us out to be a Third World country.

...even if we are.

Deny Deny Deny. The Haughey School of Politics.

a line failure

Minster Dempsey wrote:

I've no doubt that [article] winged itself around some of the larger companies in the US that might be thinking of investing abroad and investing in Ireland, and it was used to try and damage Ireland.

Say what you want, Dempsey, the BB situation itself is damaging Ireland with little help from our rants.

Minster Dempsey wrote:

I had some correspondence from one of those groups -- I'm not going to say which -- telling me I was "burying my head in the sand" and [saying] that everything is all right, and that we shouldn't be critical of you or what's happening with broadband, you're-not-going-to-silence-us type of thing...

Was that IOFFL?

damien

a line failure wrote:

Say what you want, Dempsey, the BB situation itself is damaging Ireland with little help from our rants.Was that IOFFL?

You can FOI it if you really want to know.

Solair

It's a weird scenario and very similar to what went on the the 1970s and early 80s regarding telephone service.

At that stage, P&T was providing horrendously poor service, making people wait months for a phoneline... sound familiar?

Anyway, the government was pushed into action by the industry, commerce and the IDA who basically put the communications network on the agenda as a matter of extreme urgency. Telecom got the resources and the mandate to roll out a cutting edge digital network. Unfortunately, it seems we've now turned the clock back!

This time it's not a lack of resources, it's a lack of proper regulation.

eircom's not the only thing that's holding up broadband rollout here, they're just doing what any private company would do.

We've got:

1) Seriously poor cable modem access (although it's improving)

2) ISPs with customer service that is so poor it's scary.

3) A certain ISP with high profile scary billing blunders.

4) Long waits for installation.

5) A history of high costs associated with net access that still puts
people off as the internet's percieved to be very expensive.

6) Under-resourced, unimaginative marketing of internet service. Including the use of 12 month contracts for no good reason.

7) A lack of services aimed at irish customers.

8) Until recently, very low payment (debit/credit) card usage. and Laser card is still unusable online other than on a very small number of irish sites and via world pay. The banks need to roll out Visa Debit and debit Mastercards asap. Visa debit, which is more popular in the UK than Maestro, is a debit card that behaves exactly like a visa credit card i.e. you can use it online, on the phone etc etc.

9) The government for some insane reason decided to tax payment cards with a heafty annual levy!?!

10) Endless media stories about the negatives of the internet and none about the positives. i.e. child porn, fraud, lack of service coupled with broadband issues!

11) Until recently, a strange lack of computer retailers....

To be fair to eircom, while yes they're over-priced and monopolistic they do actually market eircom broadband extensively and actually do have excellent customer service.

The problem is that we don't have anyone capable of providing real competition ... UPC (NTL/Chorus)'s broadband offerings should shake things up. They're potentially capable of doing things seamlessly.

ComReg has to start doing something to improve levels of customer service, insure billing systems are up to scratch and in general make the market more consumer-friendly.

Companies who do things like fail to provide service for weeks for no good reason, cut people off accidently, create major billing issues should be subject to enormous fines or other penalties such as suspension of their licence!

Slutmonkey57b

In fairness, customer service, billing issues, etc are all better off handled by the consumer ombudsman, rather than the telecoms regulator, and in a healthy competition these issues should be driven out of existance by market forces anyway. Comreg really needs to focus on the mechanics of how telecoms provision works.

eircomtribunal

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

Comreg really needs to focus on the mechanics of how telecoms provision works.

Cory Doctorow, novelist, blogger, writer, summed it up on his 20 June 2006 podcast "craphound"; interview with Australian's ABC's "LateNightLive":

"A phone company is nothing but a thin veneer of greed wrapped around a regulatory monopoly....

Regulatory bodies are agencies that are so captured by the phone companies, if they are our defence, we might as well give up now."

P.

lucernarian

I think it's fair to say we're "making progress" in an absolute sense. Broadband subscribers are increasing, etc. What the minister apparently fails to grasp is that the progress we're making is of the "too little, too late" variety. For the most part, any criticism levelled in this forum for example, is justified and deserves an answer.

Minister Dempsey sounds rather childish and sheepish in what he says. I think if he has a problem with the opinions of "certain commentators", then he should approach them directly rather than bandying words about in public like a child.

He could start by explaining why eircom's marketing stratagies are so messed up (failing to target ISDN customers etc) yet he still cites demand as an issue. He doesn't look at the large potential market there is in dialup, he doesn't look at the pricing policies for so-called flat-rate products. There is no incentive scheme whatsoever that might see interesting results e.g. get 4 months of eircom bb starter when you have a flat-rate package for over a year.

And no doubt he will begin to cite IOFFL, ALTO and ComWreck for putting people and business off broadband in the first place.

Foxwood

Just another thought on the issue of demand.

Harvey Norman recently bought a number of the ESB Shops that were closed a while back. One of them was opened recently in Nutgrove, and as I needed an ethernet cable, I thought I'd check their website to see if they had anything like that before going there. After all, a company that sells computers would be bound to have a website, right?

Nope.

It has always annoyed me that UK companies like Currys, Dixons, Boots etc, can't be bothered setting up Irish website (all 3 effectively only have placeholder sites), when the incremental cost of adding an Irish site to their UK sites wouldn't be that much, but it doesn't suprise me. I was pleasantly surprised recently to find that Argos has implemented a fully functional .ie site. In fact the foreign retailers that don't sell electronics (Aldi, Lidl, Tesco) seem to be much more on the ball in this respect than the electronics stores. (The cynic might argue that the typcial electronics stores has more to lose by comparison shopping, and doesn't actually benefit by encouraging people to go online!).

Maybe the Minister (and Ireland Offline) should start doing some "naming and shaming" to encourage those who are treating Ireland like an internet backwater to do their part to stimulate demand!!!!!

(I ended up getting the cable down the road from Harvey Norman at MicroPro. Their search engine doesn't work in Firefox, and isn't very useful in IE anyway (returns over 300 hits for ethernet, and over 900 for cable, and none at all for ethernet cable), but at least they're making the effort!

Solair

I think the state should encourage e-commerce and start awarding and publicising good use of e-commerce technology, awarding the companies that help grow the demand for net access.

The comapnies that I think deserve major credit for driving it so far would be, Tesco.ie, Buy4Now, ticketmaster, ryanair, aer lingus and the major banks! AIB has one of the best online banking services I've ever used (anywhere)

Also, if the Minister was really serious about encouraging ecommerce, perhaps the government could look at incentivising it?

e.g. reduced VAT for online sales to grow Irish ebusiness.
that would definitely drive demand!

Also, the state needs to intervene in the banking system and make net-friendly debit cards available. Laser's next to useless online and the Irish banks put customers through hoops to get access to a simple debit card.

We need to be getting towards a situation where by anyone with a current account can make a purchase online with a debit card. e.g. why can't the banks roll out visa debit, visa electron etc.. I know they've plans to phase out Laser card, but perhaps we need to see them launch new cards that are more net-friendly.

The reality of it is that your average 16 year old in the UK can get their hands on a payment card that can be used online. In Ireland most banks won't even consider giving you a Laser card until you can prove all sorts of things and you can't even use that online other than in a few irish stores.

The Government's not seeing the big picture at all. There are a whole load of reasons conspiring to prevent Ireland going online in a big way. DSL access is only one of the issues. They need to be taking a multi-pronged approach to dealing with it.


Also on the payment card issue, because Ireland has no post codes it can be a total pain to get your credit card authorised by many US and UK stores. I realise that we'll be getting a postal code by 2008, but in the interim perhaps the banks could look at assigning customers a code that can be inserted as a zip/postal code so that sites can verify the card holder's details as normal ?

I wouldn't be THAT difficult for them to issue a unique 5 or 6 digit code to every customer with a card.

We also need to look at incentivising UK-based delivery companies to deliver to Irish addresses on the same basis as UK addresses and for similar prices. Perhaps, they could be encouraged with some sort of a tax incentive too?
Some of the delivery charges levied on irish customers of UK sites are astronomically expensive.


---- slightly off topic, but on the UK chain stores in Ireland issue---

I'm not supprised that they can't get their .ie sites up and running. Most of them can't even figure out that we don't use BT phone plugs. I find it amazing that Maplins and several other stores stock a vast range of BT phone accessories that gather dust on their shelves and can't seem to realise that we don't actually use them!! Surely it's not THAT difficult to source RJ11 equivilants, it's the world's most common telephone connector.

I've also noticed some UK DIY stores that sell electrical products that arn't even legal here anymore ... e.g. cooker switch socket combination units (not legal to install here for safety reasons)... and rewirable fuses (not legal and not used here since the 1950s!) - The UK used a pretty primitave rewirable fuse where as we used those little beer-bottle shaped screw-in german-style fuses that are a hell of a lot safer.

Also, it's not unusual to see prices in sterling, signs up saying that they accept Switch cards.. Notices about English consumer legislation that doesn't apply here... etc etc.

Seems we're just tagged on as a UK region and our standards, laws, websites etc are ignored.

dahamsta

While I agree with the premise outlined in the first paragraph of your post, I'm afraid I got as far as applause for the online strategies of banks in the second and couldn't go any further, what with breaking my ass laughing an' all. Irish banks are about as clued-in to the Internet as the record labels; sure, there's been an improvement recently, but only about ten years too late.

(I'll bet I'm not the only one here that had to explain what ecommerce is to the bank when looking for a merchant account not all that long ago. I ended up with two merchant accounts because of their incompetence in this regard, with interest rates Tony Soprano would applaud.)

So yes, the state needs to encourage it, but the companies need to get a f*cking clue at the same time. The Gubbiment isn't the only one not seeing the big picture...

adam

aaronc

I don't have any studies or statistics to back this up but my own impression is that the rate of improvement in Ireland's broadband offerings is pretty good. I recall the first time I could get a DSL connection in Dublin in 2002 when it cost me something like €150 for the modem, €100 install fee and around €60 or €70 per month and I think the product was 512k\64k (could be wrong) it was expensive but I was in the category of users that the time savings from switching from dialup made it worth it along with the act that I was paying €80 per month on dialup anyway.

Four years down the track and Eircom's top home ADSL package is 3M\384k. Obviously there are a lot better and more competitive products around than Eircom's but for the sake of this discussion Eircom is a good measure of how broadband offerings have improved in Ireland.

The only other place I have experience with purchasing a broadband connection is Australia. In that case broadband became available roughly around 2000 and about two years before Ireland. The Eircom equivalent in Asutralia, Telstra, probably started with a similar ADSL package to Eircom's 512K\64k, price points will be different due to cost of living etc. but once again for the sake of discussion it could be assumed Telstra and Eircom came out with a very similar initial ADSL offering. 6 Years down the track Telstra's top ADSL offering is 1.5M\256k. So that means competition has forced Eircom to offer a product twice as good as Telstra's in 2 years less time!

I realise a lot of the interest on this forum is about areas that cannot get broadband at all and this rate of increase is irrelevant. However outside of that it is worth considering that maybe the Irish broadband situation is improving a lot quicker than it has elsewhere in similar circumstances. I don't think anyone disagrees, with one or maybe two obvious exceptions, that the LLU situation is farcical and should be fixed pronto but that itself may mean Ireland ultimately ends up with stronger broadband offerings as it has given wireless and cable technologies a chance to gain a foothold. This is something that didn't really happen in Australia since it was a lot easier for Telstra to get the population covered with 95% urbanisation as oppossed to Eircom and Ireland's 60% and it could be argued that this is the reason why the rate of improvement of offerings is slow in Australia and why Ireland has overtaken it even though it started two years behind.

And yes I'm sure there are 100 other countries and oodles of statistics that highlight the opposite but at least for most of us in Irish cities the broadband offerings are pretty good when you can get them.

Aaron

Solair

I am praising the banks because they actually have usable internet banking products that are making people interested in using online services. I'm not looking at their history. The fact is that AIB, National Irish Bank/(Dansk), Ulster Bank, Rabo Direct, MBNA Ireland have excellent web-based banking facilities. Bank of Ireland and a few others are way behind, but improving. I don't know which online banking system you're familiar with, but if you browse through the features on AIB's for example, you'll find they're pretty decent.

What I'm saying is that these companies are at least making an effort to use online services while others are just sitting on their backsides and ignoring the net. The likes of online banking will actually pull people onto the net.

I do however think that the banks are being disgracefully slow to introduce those usable payment cards. PTSB's prepay (3V) visa has been a start, but it's a very clumsey and expensive sollution. They need to roll out Visa Debit/Visa Electron etc along side laser rather than waiting to 2008+ for Laser to be phased out.

Actually, I find the telcos some of the worst offenders. eircom.ie is absolutely terrible. I have never seen an uglier, more poorly organised corporate site. It looks like it was built by a 2 year old! btireland's site's glitchy and utterly useless once you get past the flashy log in screen. Oddly enough, the mobile companies rather than the companies providing ISP services are by far the best websites!

Also, many Irish companies don't seem to get the whole keep it simple stupid philosophy. I have seen quite a few websites that are difficult to navigate, don't support non Internet Explorer browsers, often for absolutely no reason and are generally unfriendly.