Interesting articles in Irish Times today

Hannibal_12

Various articles on page 14 of irish times today that would be of interest.
ODTR has given a "green light" for fixed line competition allowing consumers to not only chose their carrier but the company that controls their line rental as well, thereby eliminating multiple bills.
This move was put in place to stimulate competition as €ircom have increased their stranglehold by "winning back" 150,000 from just 320,000 cumulatively held by their competitors.
Also an article referring to tech leaders urging government to invest in broadband and for a dedicated e-minister.
Other article from BT chief saying ESAT should be profitable by march and that by 2006, their goal is to have 5,000,000 people in the UK using high speed internet thus allowing new business opportunities for content providers due to increased bandwith.
And some really good news that a division of €ircom(€ircom retail limited) breached a franchise agreement with a waterford company and forced to pay damages of IR£179,143.

Tellox

'wan waterford!
some pretty good news there..

strat

Originally posted by Hannibal_12

And some really good news that a division of €ircom(€ircom retail limited) breached a franchise agreement with a waterford company and forced to pay damages of IR£179,143.

lol class
pity it wasent IR£179,143,000 tho

**/<::ë::/\/**

IRISH TIMES ARTICLE


Home Net users pay high price for link-up


High costs mean many people cannot afford to use Net until after 6 p.m., and there is no flat-rate, unmetered-access product available, writes Clare O'Dea

It's a peculiar form of torture waiting for minutes for a website to open or a file to download, while you are paying per second for the privilege on your home PC. But as long as the only alternative service is prohibitively expensive, most home users put up with it by keeping online time to a minimum.

The latest quarterly survey from the Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulation (ODTR) shows that the average number of hours spent online per user per month in the Republic was 4:05, compared to 11:27 in the US and 6:45 in the UK.

Currently, Irish residential internet-users pay for access through a pricing model that was designed for telephone calls. Because of the per second/minute billing model many people cannot afford to use the Net and high users face high bills.

Unmetered access would mean that the calls to the internet would be free and that users would gain access simply by paying a fixed monthly subscription. It's not available here yet.

There are several basic flat rate products missing from the picture, in particular:

Always-on internet access working at the existing 56K modem speed. This is adequate for email and light users without big downloading requirements. In the UK, this type of access retails at around €22.41 per month tied to one PC and €25.61 per month for connection from any PC.

The next step up - a residential broadband offering - is for the more serious home users. Speed is what matters for surfers who want to download large digital material or use content-rich multimedia sites. It also allows users to listen to worldwide radio online. The UK market shows that this group would be prepared to pay up to €50 per month for this service.

The next offering that is required is something with very fast speeds suitable for the small business sector or remote workers.

So what is stopping us from getting these services? Depending on your perspective, the impasse can be blamed on one or all of the following: the regulations, the regulator, and the dominant company operating the network, Eircom.

Other telecoms companies cannot sell flat-rate unmetered connection to the consumer until Eircom provides them with an unmetered interconnection wholesale product. This hasn't happened yet.

An Eircom spokeswoman explained that it was very difficult to find a viable cost-based model for a wholesale flat-rate product because the costs are variable while the revenue is fixed. "At the moment we are focused on flat rate through ADSL and we have invested €125 million in that area."

The spokeswoman said that Eircom would continue to monitor the market for other products and respond accordingly.

Eircom's latest broadband offering i-stream, launched earlier this month, could not be considered a mainstream residential product because of its high pricing level. A minimum 12-month contract will cost €1,667.38, including €175.45 for the modem required to connect to the service, an initial connection fee of €199.65, and a monthly charge of €107.69.

The entry-level product, i-stream solo, is capped, meaning that anything downloaded above the 3 gigabit limit is charged at €0.0363 per megabit. A similar service in the UK from BT Openworld costs the user €48.03 a month.

Forfás in its report Broadband Investment in Ireland - Review of progress and key policy requirements update 2002, stated the following: "Significant profits from timed internet access are acting as a deterrent to operators providing always-on broadband access to business. The regulator should have the power to mandate to Eircom to introduce a fixed-rate narrowband interconnect product which would allow competing operators to offer always-on services at cost-orientated prices for basic and ISDN services."

The report noted that in 2001, the UK regulator ordered a fixed-rate programme to be introduced, enabling a range of service providers to offer always-on internet access at affordable rates.

This advice was not taken up when the Telecommunications Bill 2002 was debated just before the Dáil was dissolved. IrelandOffline, a consumer interest group campaigning for affordable internet access for homes and small businesses, believes there is sufficient strength in the directives currently in place to enable the regulator to force flat rate. However, the ODTR has not acted yet in this area.

An ODTR spokesman said that a wholesale, flat-rate, internet-access product could only be mandated if Eircom introduced its own retail offering or if another licensed operator made a reasonable request to Eircom for a wholesale package. In the latter case, "the office can intervene if the negotiations progress slowly or if either party requests it", he said.

The ODTR's position, he said, was that it did not have the power to mandate a product in response to consumer need.

Mr David Long, chairman of IrelandOffline, argues that online activity in the Republic is being curtailed by clock watching and people waiting until after 6 p.m. to use the internet. "The fear of running up a huge bill and the lack of a fixed cost for people and businesses going online stifles internet use."

There are currently two main types of internet service provider (ISP) for home users, with different charging structures. Anyone with a personal computer needs an ISP to access the internet.

With subscription ISPs, the user pays a monthly or yearly fee and internet access calls are charged at a rate, usually 1891, which is cheaper than regular local phone calls. The 1891 rates are 1.61 cents per minute, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Friday, and 0.8 cents per minute after 6 p.m. and at weekends, with a minimum charge of 5.244 cent.

ISPs in this category include Eircom Net, IOL Gold from Esat Fusion, Indigo and Connect Ireland. The monthly subscription ranges from €12.70 to €19.

The second type of ISP is marketed as "free access'. The user connects after downloading material from the ISP's free compact disc. From that point on, internet access is usually charged at local phone call rates.

Eircom Net, Oceanfree.net and IOL Free from Esat Fusion, Indigo, Unison and UTV are the main providers in the "free access" category. Call charges vary depending on what home phone company you use and some, including Eircom, have minimum charges.

The latest ODTR consumer survey showed that 44 per cent of respondents had access to the Internet at home, an increase of 7 per cent since October 2001. So internet penetration is continuing to grow apace while the access products markets is far from dynamic.

"Irish users need a flat-rate, dial-up product, which would allow them to go online any time of day for a fixed monthly fee. This freedom will act as a catalyst to develop the full potential of the internet," Mr Long said.


**/<:ë:/\/**
__________

Hannibal_12

Originally posted by StrataGIST


lol class
pity it wasent IR£179,143,000 tho

I think if it was we wouldnt be seeing any more mutant mouses running around except maybe on the street corner with a "I'll do anything for some cheese" sign.

Seriously though that article really hits the nail on the head with respect to Internet in Ireland. As I have said in other previous posts I couldn't care less about 56k access be it flatrate or not as I would be be considered a "serious" home user and want/need a fast connection but I do need to pay 3-4 times the price of my EU neighbours for DSL like I need a hole in the head. I am getting DSL however even though it is horrendously over priced since I'm paying €60-€70 per month as it is for blazing fast 56k so its not much of a jump. I feel sorry for the people who want flatrate since €ircom still seem to be spouting the same old mantra about variable costs fixed revenue etc..,
I wonder if they did introduce a wholesale flatrate product so other ISP's could offer flatrate how much it would be, I'm betting more than people want to pay.
Lastly their comment that I stream is a flatrate product is nothing short of criminal.

**/<::ë::/\/**

TAKEN FROM TODAYS IRISH TIMES
___________________________


Sale of local exchanges to public-private partnership may lead to cheaper broadband




NET RESULTS: Accepted wisdom - such as it is - is that the sale of Eircom was the worst possible development that could have happened to our woeful domestic broadband market.

At least before its sale, the company had the unusual distinction of being debt-free in a sector where nearly all other players were reeling under debt and capital expenditure. It also had been putting in fibre-optic networks, and had upgraded its Dublin exchanges and some others, enabling them to offer high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) internet access.

Then the company was sold to a group of venture capitalists in the US whose past track record is to buy cheap, "sweat the assets", as they say, get as much money as they can from their investment, and sell it on again.

That scenario promised little to those in the State hoping for some progression from the broadband impasse we have had now for months, where competition has gone out of the market. That has dashed hopes that domestic broadband prices for large companies would be pushed down, and stalled DSL rollout for consumers and smaller businesses.

The general view in many quarters has been that nothing much of promise lies ahead and that any change will have to come entirely from large-scale State intervention of some sort. However, perhaps this is not the case at all and, in reality, the market is about to shift, rather dramatically, of its own accord.

Certainly creative Government initiatives are needed to stimulate change.

The proposal to build out a network comprising several local access broadband rings around regional towns and cities, as well as Dublin, is a key part of such a plan. The rings, which would be connected to a larger broadband grid of other pieces of fibre network around the State, would be overseen by a single, public-private partnership entity, not by the big telecom companies.

Because no company would be trying to get its investment back from the actual network, the charge to use the network - to offer services, or get broadband access - would accordingly be very low.

And while some people are concerned that it will take years to build such rings and connect up such a network, this is not actually the case.

As anyone within the telecoms industry will admit, there is plenty of fibre installed all over the State - it is just lying unused (so-called "dark fibre"), because the big companies don't see an economic argument for using it. In other words, more capacity would drive down prices. The report this week from the Government's Advisory Committee on Information and Communication recommends the telecommunications regulator be given the powers to force companies to put this fibre into the market.

But back to Eircom. While the accepted perspective now is to see the company as even more reluctant to budge on such issues as unbundling, DSL or flat rate, dial-up internet access, there is another angle. Precisely the same forces that one might think will stall action may be exactly those that will force change.

The first objective of Eircom's new investors will be to start getting money out of the company. How can they do this? An obvious route is to sell some of the company's assets. A prime asset - but one that is rapidly losing value - is the local exchanges, the points at which Eircom manages the phone lines that enter individual homes and businesses. Access to the local exchanges is central to "unbundling the local loop", allowing competition for service on those local lines.

To date, one of Eircom's strongest arguments for pricing its wholesale DSL offering (which would allow competitors such as Esat/BT to also offer a commercial DSL package to customers) at a figure four to five times higher than countries such as Germany and Britain is that it had to pay the huge development costs of those exchanges.

Why, it has asked, should it then have to share its networks at a price that doesn't return the value it put into them to begin with?

Many arguments can be brought in here, but set them aside. Let's just take this argument at face value. While an incumbent player might stick by this particular defence, it makes no sense whatsoever in a changed global telecommunications market, from a now-indebted company that has been sold to new investors.

As Eircom can be only too painfully aware, the bottom has dropped out of this market and the value of networks has plummeted. Just ask Global Crossing or 360 Networks. Networks and exchanges are going cheap - to venture capitalist investor consortia, for example, who simply want to get as much value as they can out of their purchases. In the current market, and given Eircom's new investors, the argument that there is huge value in the local exchanges and the existing networks makes no real financial sense.

It perhaps makes far more sense to Eircom's investors to sell its local exchanges to, say, a public-private partnership that could then hire back Eircom to manage their operation. This kind of deal is routine for the US government, for example. The Department of Defence has such an arrangement with big network operators who install the network for the department and then are paid to manage it for them; the department, like the Irish Government, is hardly eager to become a mini-telco itself.

If such a situation happens here - and there are those who believe this will be the case - local exchanges would suddenly be directly open to competition, which would spur service offerings, while driving prices down precipitously for, say, DSL.

If one of the primary reasons for Eircom's wholesale price for DSL to be €75 per month - as opposed to £14.75 sterling (€24) in Britain - is the greater expense they had of building out Irish networks and a lack of economies of scale (or whatever else they choose to throw out there), these defences would evaporate.

SkepticOne

I think that article is from a few months ago, **/<::ë::/\/**.