If Eircom ever needed proof!

crawler

From ENN today...

While broadband is still a dream for most in Ireland, the number of Internet users in the UK with home broadband Internet access has risen by 60 percent over the past six months, according to new research from NOP. The survey also said that 75 percent of broadband users feel that the amount of time they spend on the Web has risen steadily since switching from a narrowband link

LoBo

Here's a link to the story:

http://www.newmediazero.com/nmz/story.asp?id=236366

Only a quarter of UK Internet users said that cost was preventing them from switching to broadband.

I'd say in Ireland its more like 50% of users didn't know it was available, 40% of users can't get it because of their location and pretty much everyone would say the cost is prohibitive...

MDR

Can i refer you to the survery resultshttp://www.irelandoffline.org/survey/results/current/image001.gif

Hannibal_12

I think its blatantly well established now that the UK is streets ahead of us when its comes to broadband. Its also significantly more developed industrially and has a much higher population. These factors, however, only go so far to mitigate the shambles that is consumer broadband here. Dublin, by far the largest city (in fact the only city according to EU guidelines(<200,000,I think)) with a decent population (1.2million) has extremely limited access to any broadband internet and those who do have access and required to pay exorbitant prices.
This is compounded by an operator who tells us that only half the people in the country are interested in the internet and that we don’t need/want DSL and so this apparently validates their ludicrous pricing as its targeted at business customers. Residents in Ireland, it would seem, are different to those in every other EU country. Flat rate narrowband isn’t "viable" because of "fixed revenues and variable costs", so we can't have that either.
It just depresses me reading articles about other countries where you have people using 1mb lines for the same price per month as my 56k bill.
I think emigration is the only option.

ednwireland

erm eircon don't want to roll out DSL it's not in their interest they can roll out ISDN with no change to their charging structure or to their infrastructure. i doubt i will ever see DSL in South west donegal tech companies I deal with are already pulling out or certainly not putting any more people into the area new companies would be daft to locate here cos we have no infrastructure, at least i didn't vote for that shower of liars in government (pd's and FF)