Excellent Letter in Irish Times

SkepticOne

COST OF INTERNET ACCESS

Sir, - The tide of technology marches ever forth . . . not just for the ordinary Irish person. After a long series of delays, the Irish consumer (both the business and the home user), was finally introduced to Eircom's - and thus Ireland's only - ADSL pricing scheme last week.

ADSL is basically a way of connecting to the Internet at high speeds, 24 hours a day and without any call charges - just a flat monthly fee. And what a fee it is! An initial payout for hardware and connection fees of more than £250 followed by monthly fees of £95 (including the VAT that Eircom's advertised figures conveniently omit).

The 3GB (gigabyte) limit on the amount of data you can download and reports from the recent business trials that ". . . at peak times a connection speed of just 1Kbps . . . was common" do not engender confidence in a service which the vast majority of ordinary working people would struggle to afford.

A 3GB limit is a pitifully small amount in an era where websites with multimedia content are exploding in numbers and freely available. Downloadable software often exceeds 3GB in size. And 1Kbps is very much slower than modems were even 10 years ago when Spectrum computers were still commonplace. Yet the service remains one of the most expensive in Europe.

Eircom's bizarre justifications serve only to undermine public confidence even more and cause confusion, such as: "Most ADSL suppliers apply a monthly download allowance, after which a per MB charge is levied".

There are no other ADSL providers in Ireland, so "most" can refer only to foreign providers operating in different countries on different networks and operating further afield than Britain, where no commercially viable ADSL service applies such a low limit at the prices being charged by Eircom.

Meanwhile, Eircom's baffling refusals to increase the gain on ordinary phone lines to improve the meagre dial-up connections that most Irish people use to access the Internet has only worsened the downward spiral Irish Internet users find themselves caught up in.

Add to this the fact that Eircom continues to price ISDN out of the range of ordinary users - even though the technology is now over 30 years old and provided as standard to all users in the German market. Ireland is faced with the real prospect that the next UN rankings of IT excellence will place Ireland very much further down the list than its current and highly desirable position of 13th.

Last month, Eircom executives stated that "47 per cent of adults in Ireland have no interest in the Internet" as a seemingly weak-willed attempt to justify poor services to the (rapidly growing) 53 per cent of Irish users that do have an interest in the Internet and its possibilities.

While the ODTR does its best to right the wrongs of over enthusiastic - if not misplanned - privatisation, surely the Government should maximise Ireland's remaining public resources; the technology to provide cheap access to the Internet over power lines exists and has been tested extensively in Europe. Surely the ESB can be financed to provide or at least research such a service?

Maybe the people of Ireland would take to the Internet more readily if they could afford the charges of the ESB system, which would be one of the first national networks of this kind in the world, rather than the current situation where they can't afford to subscribe to what appears to be a very second-rate broadband solution. - Yours, etc.,

ALEXANDER BOWIE, Highthorn Park, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.

Giblet

Nice letter
But the thing that pisses me off more than
Price or the sh*te connection speeds at peak
Its the cap of 3gb and especially the fact when u exceed this limit
you have to pay by the MB
It MIGHT just be passable if it was per GB but per MB
imagine you were downloading a large file of say 300mb
and you were very close to the 3GB cap
would there be ANY kind of warning
even if there was, lets just say u leave that file downloading
and go out. when you come back u find u went 300MB over the
limit, how much would that amount to?
all BULL