Ireland's Broadband Failures

trekkypj

This is a bit of a rant, so apologies to all.

It seems a shame, really that we have such problems with broadband here.

Until recently, I believed that the answer to our local broadband problems lies in Europe, if we can get them to listen. Unfortunately things have become so convoluted in that respect, what with competition issues and lack of clarity with respect to grant, and many other issues. Europe has become a knotted and twisted nightmare of bureaucracy.

The broadband issue in Ireland is becoming so farcical it's unreal. Other countries with greater financial problems have somehow managed to build a network infrastructure which is at least half decent. We still have telephone poles which are lying in ditches, exchanges which have still to be upgraded to DSL, and all of this when we should be skipping a tech generation which is becoming obsolete in itself.

Our main Telco is €4bn or so in debt and in the process of being sold for the fifth or sixth time since 2001. The government, in a desperate attempt to fool both the public and Europe, are claiming that 3G is a solution to the broadband divide, which of course is absurd. It's a subsidy for mobile coverage in a cheap suit.

What really bothers me is that we could have done it right and when the MANs were built, they could have formed the basis of a national fibre network which could be opened up to all providers on an equal access basis.

There has been so much spin, deceit, lies, misunderstanding and sheer incompetence that the only answer seems to be to take the matter out of the hands of the Irish Government and assign it to someone else. Unfortunately, there is no body else. Given the abject failures in regulation and in market reform in broadband, and the disasterous attempts at rural roll-out, we need a broadband commission with powers to build, maintain and regulate broadband and NGN internet access for 100% of households in this country.

I highly doubt this will happen. This is a state which rewards bureaucracy. It praises spin and frustrates change. And until the powers that be get their heads out of their respective posteriors, this will remain the case.

Discuss.

Solair

I agree with you on all of the above. The entire thing stems from the same incompetent Government and bureaucracy which simply does not understand anything about organisation.

1) eircom has been allowed to be asset stripped, sold, re-sold, become debt-laden, and is now quite clearly not going to be financially sound enough to take that aspect of our network forward.

2) Bad planning has led to an unsustainable mess of houses scattered all over the countryside. This is causing major infrastructural problems as many of them are practically off-grid and it's not really economically viable for commercial entities like eircom to provide them with services comparable to those in a village, town or city. It's the same reason that we've had sewage in waterways etc etc.

3) The cable industry was allowed to flounder for well over a decade. Both Chorus and NTL failed abysmally to achieve any kind of serious broadband rollout despite having ample opportunity to do so. Whatever was going on with those two companies, they were a disaster. They've only started to have a serious impact since they were taken over and sorted out by UPC !

4) Lost opportunities - as mentioned above, something more useful could have been done with the MAN networks.
The Government also didn't bother to implement any kind of broadband strategy when hundreds of thousands of new homes were being built. These could have been made ready for very high speed broadband with fibre-to-kerb from eircom and the cable companies etc etc. Even a bit of ducting would have been a help!

5) The political classes in Ireland clearly do not understand telecommunications at all. I have had a few conversations with TDs who seemed to think that DSL was something to do with the digitalisation projects carried out by Telecom Eireann in the early 1980s!! I have been given lines like 'arn't all of our exchanges digital?' ... that was an achievement 25 years ago, it's old hat now.

Also, every time broadband is discussed or any initiavies are taken they are ALWAYS at the backhaul level. We seem to have endless fibre optic backbone capacity. It's like building motorways but putting now on ramps or exists on them!

I honestly don't think the authorities here have a clue about the technology involved.

I also think this does need to be turned political. There's no hiding from the fact that Fianna Fail privatised eircom and also implemented all of the policies which have landed us in this mess.

Fianna Fail entered office in 1997, just as the internet was becoming a big deal and technologies like DSL were emerging. Their utter incompetence has seen us going through over a decade of losing our competitive edge in telecommunications.

In the late 1980s and into the mid 1990s, Ireland's communications infrastructure was actually very good by international comparisons. However, it's been basically allowed to sit and fester since then.

From a job creation point of view, this is as big a deal as the banks.

I find it incredible that the Government can find billions for the banking sector, or to prop up their buddies in construction, yet, they won't spend anything on telecommunications development.

As an island stuck out in the North Atlantic, telecommunications infrastructure is as one of the absolute fundamental platforms on which we can build our economy. If our networks are crap, we are going to find it increasingly difficult to compete on the global stage and we're going to find getting out of this recession impossible.

These idiots in office simply have to go. There's really no other option!

Roll on election 2009!

/END OF RANT