Sunday Business Post ....

zod

According to broadband lobby group, Ireland Offline, Irish consumers are still getting a “raw deal'‘ in broadband.

http://www.thepost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqid=2505-qqqx=1.asp

“Consumers are paying the highest prices for the most archaic of broadband services while additionally having to pay a line rental that's 50 per cent above the EU average,” said Damien Mulley, chairman of Ireland Offline.

zod

http://www.thepost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqid=2502-qqqx=1.asp

The broadband lobby group, Ireland Offline, argues that broadband prices in Ireland are still more expensive than the rest of Europe.

It says that, while high-speed broadband, such as one megabyte connections, are widely available at affordable prices throughout Europe, the opposite is true for Ireland.

“The main ADSL product being availed of in Ireland is the 512 kbps service, which is considerably slower than a 1 megabyte connection,” said Damien Mulley, chairman of Ireland Offline.

“Although one megabyte products are available here, they are still too expensive to be considered by most of the public.

“As countries like France, Germany and Belgium all head towards having ten megabyte connections to people's homes, we here in Ireland are still struggling to get even a basic ADSL service.”

damien

“Everyone agrees that competition would bring these prices down but Eircom is too selfish to share its resources which, ironically, were initially funded by the taxpayer.”

Didn't realise there was going to be two articles. Good stuff.

BrianD

The article did raise a key issue about adsl. Our low population density and anarchic development strategy means that it is going to be very difficult and expensive to provide "copper" based services to many people in rural Ireland. In fairness you can't blame the incumbent telco for that.

Moriarty

Jaysus Brian, not this again please.

d-j-k

I'd be interested to get a TRUE (non BT spin) comparison with Northern Ireland.

I keep hearing this 100% availability quote and as yet haven't seen any figures. It's quite possible that it's in 100% of northern ireland's exchanges. I'd like to see how that equates to availability at the other end of the phone lines though.

And what BT define as an exchange! Eircom can be quite fuzzy about this. e.g. it could be available at 100% of eircom's exchanges but not necessarily at 100% of the RSU (Remote Subscriber Units) (mini-exchanges located remotely from a larger parent exchange)

jwt

here

here

and

here

these should give you a start

John

Capt'n Midnight

BrianD wrote:

The article did raise a key issue about adsl. Our low population density and anarchic development strategy means that it is going to be very difficult and expensive to provide "copper" based services to many people in rural Ireland. In fairness you can't blame the incumbent telco for that.

Try telling that to people living in Dublin county near major international telecoms and IT manufacturers. ISDN has been available to most of rural UK , germany , scandanavia for the last decade at a fraction of the Irish cost.

The bottom line is you can't expect a telco that boasts about investing €200m in thier network to provide stable infrastructure when they are writing off about €400m of it each year.. major investors have stripped the company for twice it's value - it's an empty husk and no amount of spin will replace that money.