Low BB Takeup is ALL Our Fault sez the Fat Controller

Sponge Bob

Its not price and its not availibility said the Fat Controller. There just are not enough stations in which he can park his trains is one excuse.

McRedmond admits Ireland has passed the early adopter phase, but argued that a major hurdle preventing broadband take-up is the low level of PC penetration in Ireland at only 42.3pc, far behind Sweden (54pc) and the US (82pc).

Arse o Fat one. The reason why computer ownership lower than other countries is because eircom spent years peddling their low cost '2nd line installations' and crippled the lines with Pairgains while so doing. Therefore there is nothing to connect the computer to really !

Other countries with a lower PC ownership than ours have higher BB penetration rates because line rental and BB are pitched at realistic prices , Estonia anyone ? In Ireland you have to rent a decrepit crapheap of a line from Eircom with no service level and are expected to muck along on that.

Then he worried about the lack of shops in South Dublin

Okay, you can go and buy a computer online, for example, but there are few places in the whole of south Dublin that you can physically walk in and buy a PC. This is clearly something that’s missing in the Irish market.”

You can do nothing online at 16.8k O plump one .

He said another factor that is impacting universal broadband rollout is the need for compelling reasons for people to adopt broadband. “We all know of things such as downloading music, buying Ryanair and Aer Lingus flights and great examples of e-government such as the Revenue On-Line service and the Motor Tax website, but we need more reasons for people to want broadband.”

Can we have lines capable of carrying Broadband some tim in this decade , speed is most compelling I find. Again he transmuted less than 60% coverage into 90% with no critical input form the journo

“Here, we are heading towards 90pc and are only looking for the Government to complete the last portion. While the Government has set aside funds in the Group Broadband Scheme, it could take years to complete judging by the current rate of applications. What we are saying is less piecemeal, let’s go and complete the job. Our task is clear — everyone should have broadband.

Everyone should have Functional Internet Access first surely, there is no point enabling exchanges where the lines are all pairgained to hell is there ?

Then of course there is the cost. Eircom could do 700 exchanges for €70m tops , thereby enabling every exchange in Ireland but wants the government to give it €100s of Millions to do the same job when the government already gives eircom millions of €€€s every month anyway under the line rental scheme.

I have lost any respect I had for Silicon Republic for printing this farce as is.

JohnC.

Funny he should say the early adopter phase is over. I'd be an early adopter if I had half a chance. I've wanted DSL since it was something which only existed in labs and I'm still waiting. Thanks Fat Controller.

damien

Here we go again, more misleading bollox. ComReg and the DCMNR will no doubt try and latch on this this excuse for failing to "stimulate" the market. The Three Lies Men* (ComReg, DCMNR, eircom) of the Irish Telecoms market have previously lived in their delusional excuses dreamworld as one big happy family. Speaking for myself I'm going to do my very best to make sure this excuse is not promoted any more than it has been.

This PC penetration LIE/excuse is the latest in a long list of excuses for why we are the laughing stock of europe for broadband. It is quite frustrating that the likes of myself and JWT had to take time off work today and travel to Dublin so we could educate the EU on the real broadband facts in Ireland. It's not the job of a voluntary group to do this and yet we had to.


* I'm happy to licence this phrase using a Creative Commons license.

ednwireland

yep me too, i'm on the edge of the pathetic distance limit but in the 18minths since the exchange being upgraded have tried to get someone to give me broadband. even written to mcredmond - reply
this man is pathetic and the press keep printing this rubbish

zuma

He may be pathetic...but hes well paid(€500,000 incl a BIG Bonus) to be pathetic!!!

Sleepy

SpongeBob, Silicon Republic is no more than a commercial rag. Have a look at a couple of months worth of articles, organisations/companies getting editorial will have advertising in one of their print medias (http://www.siliconrepublic.com/print/index.html)

Didn't realise it myself til I dated a girl who was working for them at the time, once it was pointed out, I couldn't believe how blatant it was.

zuma

Yeah they do like to carry the eircom line.

They appear in the Irish Independent to boost their online hits which increases revenue.

And who controls the Irish Independent and eircom???.....thats right Tony "the Knight" O'Reily!!!!

Solair

The PC penitration levels may be being used as an excuse, but there is something fundementally wrong with the Irish internet market it makes absolutely no sense.

This is one of the richest, youngest, most IT savvy countries in the world yet we've got some of the most patheticly poor internet access statistics seen anywhere in the EU.

The monopoly that was allowed to occur in the ISP market which was ignored by the comeptition authrority is an absolute disgrace. We had a large number of small ISPs when the internet first became a reality in Ireland. These were all swallowed up by Eircom and Esat (now BT) with in a very short space of time. When the market had reached a reasonable level of maturity and there were some interesting products available on line we were stuck with Eircom.net/Indigo or IOL/Esat products and very little else.

Eircom's call charges for net access over the years were so high that I feel that they've done almost irreparable damage to the internet market in Ireland as many people were stung with enormous internet access related telephone bills over the years and this has left Irish consumers stigmatised and with the assumption that internet access is a very expensive luxury that they don't need. There were loads of horror stories about £400+ telephone bills that were enough to scare any right thinking mortgage holder into thinking that the internet was a bad thing.

On the other side of it, the government and the Irish media has done a lot to prove that the internet is in fact "A tool of the devil" by only playing up the bad side of being on line.. i.e. child porn, scams, trogan horses etc.. and does little or nothing to promote any of the positives of "life on line". All this does is scare yet more conservative types away from ever considering letting a PC inside their house.

Add to that, a lack of decent internet services. None of our major ISPs offer any sort of a customer friendly AOL or MSN like experience for their customers. While this type of service may make the experienced internet user feel queezy, there are many people who find AOL, MSN and BT-Yahoo like services very useful. Irish ISPs seem to be content to simply provide raw internet access with very little in terms of add on services that might attract people to the internet. I would welcome MSN, AOL, Yahoo or Wanadoo opening up in Ireland as it would have a very stimulating effect on the market.

The banking sector:

Ireland has some of the lowest numbers of "payment card" (debit/credit) hoders in Western Europe. This is for a number of factors, the banks have employed ridiculously over the top rules and basically have refused to offer credit cards to most of the younger members of Irish society. The very people who would be most likely to use online services / online shopping. We also have had one of the most restrictive and underused debit card systems on the planet. When Laser was launched it had no connection to any other debit card scheme, you couldn't get your hands on a laser card unless you met all sorts of ridiculous criteria and then if you did get it you couldn't use it online!. I can't understand why Irish banks can't offer a MasterCard or Visa debit scheme that would be as usable as a credit card opening up a world of online possibilities for customers.

---- As a sub point, Ireland lack of a postal code system has meant that many Irish credit cards can't be verified against their card holders address. The result of this is that they're being refused by an ever increasing number of websites! (Needs to be addressed by the banks as a matter of urgency)

Also, we need to look at encouraging more UK, US and European online services to look at the Irish market. There's a catch 22 situation, where by the market's small and relatively under developed in terms of online activity, so they're not all that interested and until they do become interested that online activity's not going to grow.

Oh yeah, the other point in my rant.

IMRO/IRMA did their upmost to delay the launch of online music sales in Ireland. We were amongst the last places in Europe to get access to services like Apple's iTunes Music Store and we still don't have access to many of the services that are taken for granted in the UK and USA. Again, this serves to further dampen the Irish use of online services.
Also, these services are hampered by the lack of credit cards / debit cards that can be used online that are held by young people who might actually use them.


Basically, to put it in simple terms, there are a lot of factors conspring to bollox the entire Irish internet market!

Most of which can be blaimed on monopolises, duopolies, cartels and other forms of market distortion in the telecoms and banking sector. No one seems to be doing very much about it.

The government is either in cahoots with them or is incapable of taking action. For some reason they're failing miserably to do anything that might benefit the average member of the Irish public.

I don't see the point in blaiming the individual regulatory agencies, they can only do what they're mandated to do. If they don't have the statutory tools to deal with opening up these markets they simply can't achieve anything.

It's time to seriously open up these areas of the irish economy to full scale competition! The internet situation's just a symptom of a much deeper and more dangerous problem.

paulm17781

Solair wrote:

I can't understand why Irish banks can't offer a MasterCard or Visa debit scheme that would be as usable as a credit card opening up a world of online possibilities for customers.

Laser is becoming Maestro, my Laser card is also a Maestro card and I know AIB are phasing out Laser in place of Maestro. I know it is several years late but atleast it is being done. Maestro is the Debit card version of Mastercard.

Solair

Laser's not being phased out. AIB and NIB have just combined Maestro and Laser functions to the same smart card. IPSO (Irish Payments Service Organisation) i.e. the "clearing banks" in Ireland own the Laser scheme and have given no indication that they're selling it on to Maestro or anyone else.


Even the co-branded Laser-Maestro cards are relatively useless online.

In the USA for example, you can get a MasterCard debit card, which behaves exactly like a MasterCard credit card. As far as the online sites or retailers are concerned it's just a MasterCard there's no distinction between debit and credit.

I cannot see why a similar service isn't made available here. Hardly any online retailers can accept Maestro at the moment and I've had my AIB Laser-Maestro card declined by UK sites that claimed they accept Maestro.

Switch, a similar system to Laser in the UK was completely converted to Maestro. However, some banks in the UK offer alternative debit card schemes to Switch/Maestro.. At least there's a bit more choice!

Visa have similar systems.. Electron etc

The AIB and NIB Co-branding's nothing to do with Laser per se, those individual banks have decided to go that route.

ciaran76

He is a joke this guy, He is telling us its not the price etc etc what rock did he crawl out from under :mad:

Some of my mates can't get hooked up to Broadband cos they are not in the "right area" makes me laugh that

Solair

it's a vicious circle.. no broadband = low pc take up... low pc take up - lower broadband take up.

All comes down to the same issue... lack of competition!

Sponge Bob

Solair wrote:

it's a vicious circle.. no broadband = low pc take up... low pc take up - lower broadband take up.

All comes down to the same issue... lack of competition!

PC takeup by household (2005) is over 50% , not 42% like the Fat Controller said.

PC (OR Playstation PS2 instead) penetration is over 60% of households.

The Fat Controller is carefully talking thru his arse to a craven and cowed so called 'journalist' who is too lazy to check what spoUteth the Fat Controller at him.

The worst thing about these muppet journalists is that if they repeat this garbage often enough those other flutes in Comreg will also start to believe and repeat this complete ****e ....like they did with the 80% bollox earlier this year.

Anyway, how did Estonia get so far past us in the BB penetration stakes with even fewer PCs and bugger all playstations ???????????

Blaster99

Solair wrote:

This is one of the richest, youngest, most IT savvy countries in the world yet we've got some of the most patheticly poor internet access statistics seen anywhere in the EU.

I've lived in a few tech savvy countries and this is not one of them. I'm not sure if the lack of broadband etc is a function of that or if it's the other around. I suspect if people actually cared about broadband then politicians would be more inclined to do something about it. I was late for work so happened to listen to the Marian Finucan show a while ago and she was covering broadband for some reason. She felt that it was necessary to apologise to the listeners for talking about broadband and promised that it would be short and sweet. Broadband is nearly always talked about in terms of competitiveness and economics, which implies that it's not something the ordinary person is all that interested in.

I had a visit by an Eircom rep the other day and she was amazed about how hard it was to sell ADSL to small traditional Irish businesses. This was not a case of not buying from Eircom or lack of availability, they were simply not interested.

JohnC.

Sponge Bob wrote:

PC takeup by household (2005) is over 50% , not 42% like the Fat Controller said.

PC (OR Playstation PS2 instead) penetration is over 60% of households.

Actually, that's an interesting point. It's not just about PC penetration anymore. I was forgetting about PS2 and Xbox being broadband compatible products too. Of the houses I know which don't have a PC, the majority do have a PS2 or Xbox.

And the new Xbox 360 is coming by the end of the year which will make even more use of broadband, followed by the PS3 and the new Nintendo next year, which will also use broadband more. And for online functions, these consoles require broadband. Dial-up isn't good enough.

I know many people here probably won't be interested in hearing about consoles, but broadband is becoming a large part of them, so buyers who can't get broadband will be missing out to an increasing extent. Nintendo will even be releasing their entire back catalogue of all console generations for download on their new console. And we have the highest Playstation penetration outside Japan.

eircomtribunal

Solair wrote:

On the other side of it, the government and the Irish media has done a lot to prove that the internet is in fact "A tool of the devil" by only playing up the bad side of being on line.. i.e. child porn, scams, trogan horses etc.. and does little or nothing to promote any of the positives of "life on line". All this does is scare yet more conservative types away from ever considering letting a PC inside their house.

Back in 2002 we already credited Bertie in this regard. Albeit our hopes expressed in Dermot were of a premature nature:

P.

spongebob

His minions have done the research for the Fat Controller , I would like to share some of it with you.

1. Ireland does not have enough fluent Klingon speakers.
2. There are too few active trainspotters in Killarney.
3. Newts don't shag very often in our climate thereby reducing the demand for webcams.
4. The banks are too concerned about security to let us at our money.

Capt'n Midnight

Sponge Bob wrote:

Then he worried about the lack of shops in South Dublin

Okay, you can go and buy a computer online, for example, but there are few places in the whole of south Dublin that you can physically walk in and buy a PC. This is clearly something that’s missing in the Irish market.”

Sounds to me like McRedmond is publically acknowledging that we just don't have the infrastructure to order PC's online. Strange because unless I'm mistaken the vast majority of PC's in the EU over the last decade were either made in this country or the bulk of their components (by value) came from here... ( used to be true for MAC's too )

The mind boggles.

AndrewMc

Solair wrote:

Eircom's call charges for net access over the years were so high that I feel that they've done almost irreparable damage to the internet market in Ireland as many people were stung with enormous internet access related telephone bills over the years and this has left Irish consumers stigmatised and with the assumption that internet access is a very expensive luxury that they don't need. There were loads of horror stories about £400+ telephone bills that were enough to scare any right thinking mortgage holder into thinking that the internet was a bad thing.

Not just the call charges, but the line rental too. I seem to recall we have a falling proportion of people with land lines? I know that when I moved into an apartment in Dublin the first thing I did was to ditch the phone line - I had Internet access in work anyway. I'd guess a lot of office-workers only bother with the Internet in work.

solair wrote:

The banking sector:

Ireland has some of the lowest numbers of "payment card" (debit/credit) hoders in Western Europe. This is for a number of factors, the banks have employed ridiculously over the top rules and basically have refused to offer credit cards to most of the younger members of Irish society.

The governement also did immense damage to electronic commerce when they introduced the 40 euro tax on CC accounts and 10 euro for Laser cards. I know several people who closed all their CC accounts when that came in.

solair wrote:

The government is either in cahoots with them or is incapable of taking action. For some reason they're failing miserably to do anything that might benefit the average member of the Irish public.

Like ComReg, they're actively denying there's even a problem. I think that's because they'd finally have to admit it's their fault in the first place and that'd be being just a bit too honest. They've been boasting about our wonderful "progress" for so long it'd be a whiplash-inducing U-turn of government opinion.

zuma

Well the British now have more Broadband connections than DialUP now mostly due to the current high 90%'s of Broadband coverage(DSL/Cable/Wireless).

What is our current percentage anyway???

Eircom have only themselves to blame!!!

Sponge Bob

zuma wrote:

What is our current percentage anyway???

c. 60% .

eircomtribunal

zuma wrote:

Eircom have only themselves to blame!!!

Eircom is making a profit from every Internet user n o t switching to broadband.

P.