“Selective, inaccurate and misleading”

These were the words used by Mr Justice Moriarty in relation to information supplied by the Department of Communications to its then minister Alan Dukes. Mr Dukes unwittingly misled his Dáil colleagues as a result of this misinformation. Nothing much has changed in the last 15 years. Department of Communications  officials sent their Minister out to bat for Ireland with Broadband Performance data  that is at best incomplete and,in our opinion, seemingly suspect.

On Wednesday, May 2nd in Dublin’s Digital Hub at the launch of the Next Generation Broadband Taskforce Report, communications minister Pat Rabbitte misled his audience with selective, inaccurate and misleading information in a vain attempt to flatter Ireland’s broadband status.

Furthermore he misled Dáil Eireann by repeating the same misinformation.

The information concerns a report from Akamai named “the State of the Internet”  Q4 2011 and on the relative quality of broadband in countries globally and regionally. This report only serves to highlight the current “Digital Divide” between the main urban areas and the rest of the country.

Facts

1. The Akamai methodology only accepts figures from fixed line connections in three Irish cities; Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
2. Akamai’s methodology excludes all mobile connections (meaning all NBS customers)
3. No Irish city is in the top 100 Global cities yet somehow Ireland overall is shown in the top 10 for download speeds.
4. One provider, mainly in the cities, is skewing the figures for the whole island. This report only serves to highlight the growing “digital divide” between areas that are served by cable broadband and the rest of the country. Rollout of FTTC/FTTP connections are sorely needed in all areas (urban and rural) to lift the average connection speed for the vast majority of consumers throughout the Republic

Most Tellingly Ireland along with Slovakia and Italy Topped the NARROWBAND table in Europe. This serves to demonstrate the growing “digital divide” as outlined in the report and the failure of the incumbent to address broadband coverage in mostly rural areas, leaving over 20,000 consumers with no broadband at all.

Figure 35: Narrowband Connectivity, Slowest European Countries

Country %

- Italy 0.7% -7.9% -30%
– Slovakia 0.7% -35% -48%
– Ireland 0.7% -16% -70%
– Belgium 0.3% 35% 0.3%
– Austria 0.3% 0.4% -40%
– Poland 0.2% -8.5% -69%
– Portugal 0.2% 7.2% -37%
– Czech Republic 0.2% 78% -10%
– Hungary 0.1% -6.7% -57%
– Romania 0.1% -15% -56%

Sadly Minister Rabbitte did not choose to apologise for this table topping exercise on his watch.

Correction required

Akamai’s report stands on its own merits, but in extrapolating fixed line data from just three Irish cities to the whole country, Mr Rabbitte has given a misleading, inaccurate and selective picture of the state of broadband in Ireland as a whole. Most Irish consumers outside of the main cities are stuck on DSL or mobile technology which usually reach the dizzying speeds of 3Mbs, hardly something to shout about.

We, in IrelandOffline, will continue analysing a more realistic dataset and depict the true situation in our continuing series of quarterly reports. The next report is due in June.

IrelandOffline calls on minister Rabbitte to publicly clarify the methodology behind the Akamai statistics and to make a statement in Dáil Eireann correcting the misleading picture he described on the second of May in a written answer to Deputy Bernard Durkan.

IrelandOffline Quarterly Report Q1 2012 (PR)
The highlights of our report are that Ireland has the second highest cost per Megabit of data in the EU and by rather a long way we pay way above the average across the globe.

We are stagnant in terms of upload and download speeds, however the likes of Bulgaria,Moldova,Belarus,Romania, Zimbabwe and Nigeria are still ahead of us for download speeds and we are battling to stay ahead of Laos in terms of upload speeds. We are 74th in the world for upload speeds with Libya, a country with no government, catching us up fast.

Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said :”nothing much has happened on the quality front in over a year, we still languish mid-table and with the fine election promises fading out into the distance as the government does nothing…except talk and consult as ever. We always seem to be one consultation short of doing something constructive”

Wallace continued:”The Urban-Rural divide continues to expand exponentially, rural dwellers are being left behind with no action being taken to address this divide, and where recent regulatory decisions are unlikely to address the matter. The reliance on 3G as a solution is clearly flawed. Any potential LTE solution is being mis-regulated out to the margins. Bandwidth (spectrum) is like a pipe, the more bandwidth the higher the speeds can be delivered over the “pipe”.  The norm in most jurisdictions is for 20Mhz wide channels through allocation and sharing, however Comreg, want minuscule 5Mhz channels for LTE and will not permit RAN Sharing.

This fragmented spectrum will only allow LTE to deliver similar performance to 3G today, without the worst of the the cell sector disappearing (shrinking) effect at night. The only solution, in rural areas, is to mandate one provider to build the infrastructure and all other mobile providers can then use this infrastructure. This policy should deliver something akin to a modern broadband service for rural dwellers. This sharing solution is  known as RAN Sharing and is an urgent requirement in most of Ireland right now.”

Wallace went on : “There are some positive signs on the telecommunications front with the limited rollout of Fibre to the Cabinet commencing in 10 areas. These limited roll-outs simply aren’t enough, vast swathes of consumers and the country are still on dialup or on GSM EDGE..

Wallace added : “It is frankly insulting to peddle ourselves as the “Internet capital of the world”  only inside the M50 when people merely 30 miles away have no viable choice other than dialup or third world satellite solutions. Our solution seems to be it’s ok for them as long as we don’t have to do anything. The Infrastructure in some areas is so weak that we have no hope of making the EU 2020 target of MINIMUM 30mbit Broadband speeds for all citizens.

Eircom should at a minimum finish the DSL rollout programme they started in April 2007 before starting another rollout with up to 250 exchanges still not enabled for basic DSL yet.”
Figures from Comreg released today show that there are up to 25,000 Contract dialup customers scattered around the country together with many more occasional dialup users who are not officially counted.”

IrelandOffline Quarterly Report Q1 2012

This is the latest IrelandOffline Quarterly report, based as always on Ookla Netindex Data.

Two particular issues are highlighted in this report.

1. Why is Bandwidth, measured as in $ per mbit delivered, so expensive overall  in Ireland.

2. The Urban-Rural divide.  

Internationally.

Ireland dropped 8 places to 53rd place in the World during Q4 2011 and staged an insipid  recovery to 51st in Q1 2012. We passed Vietnam for download speeds and just avoided being passed by nearby Laos for Upload speeds.

In Quarter 1 2012 Ireland’s Position is as follows:

Ireland is  51st in the World  for Download Speeds and 24th out of 27 in the EU (53rd/24th Q4 2011)
Ireland is  74th in the World for Upload Speed  and 23rd out of 27 in the EU (71st/24th Q4 2011)
Ireland is  25th in the World up for Quality and 13th of *26* in the EU (23rd/18th Q4 2011
Ireland is  53rd in the World for  Promise and 23rd out of 27 in the EU (53rd/23rd Q4 2011)
Ireland is  43rd in the World  in Cost per Mbps and 26th out of 27 in the EU (43rd/25th Q4 2011)

Note on the Cost per mbit figure.

1. Why is Bandwidth, measured as in $ per mbit delivered, so expensive overall  in Ireland.

The cheapest broadband cost in the EU, measured in $ per month paid per delivered mbit is in Bulgaria, that $0.64 per mbit.

Ireland is second most expensive at $8.85 per mbit only trumped by Cyprus at $16.03. The Median price is in Belgium in which is 14th Place with $4.19  In other words most EU countries charge $4.19 per mbit delivered or less. In Ireland we pay over twice that.

Ireland relies to an inordinate extent on Mobile Broadband which typically delivers an experience around 2mbits average speed and for which the customer pays $25 a month. This results in a cost per Mbit as delivered of around $12.

2. The Urban-Rural divide.  ( and the Urban – Urban divide ) in Ireland.

Recently enabled and cabled towns, typically towns with populations between 5,000 and 20,000 are vastly outperforming  our main cities which are the main employment centres. UPC cable is largely confined to residential areas rather than core employment centres in the cities, where available.

The lack of Fast and Reasonably priced broadband in Employment Zones in the large Cities has become a critical structural bottleneck. That together with the lack of decent, reasonably priced broadband in Rural and Small Town Ireland are our two biggest problems today.

The Top 10 Towns have an average speed of 16.48mbits in Q1 2012 up from 13.16mbits in Q4 2011  and up from 12.64mbits in Q3 2011

Ireland’s top ten cities/towns and download speeds Q1 2012
1 Portarlington        23 Mbps
2 Lucan        22 Mbps
3 Swords         20 Mbps
4 Tallaght         15 Mbps
5 Waterford         14 Mbps
6 Mullingar         14 Mbps
7 Athlone        14 Mbps
8 Bray            14 Mbps
9 Clane        14 Mbps
10 Maynooth        14 Mbps

Ireland’s top ten cities/towns and download speeds Q4 2011
1 Athlone        17.48 Mbps
2 Swords         15.12 Mbps
3 Celbridge         14.12 Mbps
4 Waterford         13.60 Mbps
5 Clonmel        12.35 Mbps
6 Lucan         12.24 Mbps
7 Greystones         11.89 Mbps
8 Maynooth         11.78 Mbps
9 Tallaght         11.62 Mbps
10 Mullingar         11.11 Mbps

As ever none of the Big Cities are in the top 10.
*Dublin is in 17th place on 10.67 mbits*
*Cork is in  23rd place on 9.23 mbits*

Dublin has steadily  dropped to 17th Overall in Q1 2012 from 13th fastest overall in Q4 2011 and down from 12th fastest in Q3 2011.

Operator Speeds In The Main Cities, Q1 2012.

The most crucial piece of data in there is the sheer meaninglessness of eircoms NGB advertising. eircom has migrated many of its customers from fixed 1 or 3 mbit products to ‘up to’ 8mbit packages over the course of the 6 quarters shown in those figures.

However the net gain in delivered speeds has been an increase from 4mbits to 4.7mbits over that time. A very good example of the ‘meaninglessness’ of this Next Generation marketing exercise is shown in the speed test results  since 2009 from Navan County Meath.

NGB deployment took the average Navan Man from around 3 mbits to perhaps 3.5mbits overnight.

Meanwhile the average  UPC customer left the average eircom customer in the dust.

Source = http://www.netindex.com/download/4,74539/Navan/?tab=3

Furthermore UPC Customers are seeing the performance gap closing between the services available  in Ireland and those available to UPC customers in other EU countries. Nevertheless Ireland Offline is concerned at recent comments that were  made about UPC ‘flatlining’ their speed roadmap  and we will attempt to clarify this over the course of the quarter.

That is of major concern because the only noticeable large scale improvement in Irish Broadband speeds is largely coming from UPC customers. It was they alone who got us past Vietnam during  this quarter.

EU Download Speeds Q1 2012.

EU Upload Speeds Q1 2012

EU Download Speed Performance Gap
Google Netindex Visualisation (Select Download Speeds) January 2008 (Source)

Google Netindex Visualisation (Select Download Speeds) November 2011 (Source)

Notes:

Click on an INDIVIDUAL country inside a listing for City and ISP Statistical Drilldowns.

Download Index http://www.netindex.com/download/
World (All Countries) http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/
EU http://www.netindex.com/download/1,7/EU/
Town and City Speeds http://www.netindex.com/download/2,49/Ireland/
Upload Index http://www.netindex.com/upload/allcountries/
Quality Index http://www.netindex.com/quality/allcountries/
Promise Index  http://www.netindex.com/promise/allcountries/
Cost Index. http://www.netindex.com/value/1,7/EU/#COUNTRY_RANK ( click Cost per Mbit)
Click HERE To get a Visualisation (press play button to see the last 3 years)

Probable eircom Fibre To The Cabinet locations
This is the overall picture for Ireland.

This is very similar to the original DSL rollout locations, one can only hope that other areas will eventually be enabled as was the case in the original programme, which however is still not yet completed.

These are the Dublin locations:

Publish the Report

Ireland Offline calls on Minister Rabbitte to publish the report of the Broadband Taskforce before his department makes another irreparable blunder.

Late (yet again)

The report of the Broadband Taskforce, first proposed by Noel Dempsey in 2007, will be concluded, according to Minister Rabbitte, by Saint Patrick’s Day 2012. While this is about five years later than former minister Dempsey anticipated and ten years too late by the standards of any other country apart from Greece perhaps, it is already three months later than Minister Rabbitte himself promised only nine months ago. Are we then to be another consultation short of actually doing something constructive for Ireland Inc ?

Secretive

The Department of Communications are very difficult to obtain timely and accurate information from, this is a given. The closed mentality and unwillingness to consult has meant that previous schemes lacked either engineering expertise or a willingness on the part of officials to gather knowledge from the public in a meaningful way. We hope that Minister Rabbitte will do better this time. Does the Minister run the Department or do the unnamed, unaccountable departmental officials run the Minister.?

The Minister views partnership with business as a core belief# and his Taskforce has been notable for its exclusion of any consumer or stakeholder representation. Accepting that CEOs of businesses are charged first with providing returns to their shareholders, and to help redress that imbalance, the Minister should at least make the report, and its recommendations, available to the public for a full and inclusive consultation, before any  Government decisions are made.

Wasteful

Over the past eight years more than €120M# of public money has been made available for rural broadband. Of that, less than €4M# has actually been spent on broadband worth the name; the rest has either not been spent at all, or spent on technology unfit for purpose. We cannot afford any more waste.

Last Chance for Ireland

A  lot of scarce money will be required for a national NGA# project.  Ireland will only get one chance to do it right. The Minister and his department, holding the chair of the Taskforce, will have set its agenda. If he intends to exclude the public, he will have to be satisfied that those in his department who delivered the privatisation of Telecom Éireann, are the right people to deliver, unsupervised and unscrutinised, the next big necessary step,in communications development for Ireland.

Minister Rabbitte should publish his Taskforce Report immediately.

(1) interview with RCRWireless
(2) Public funding budgets: GBS €25M, NBS €79.8M, RBS €17.9M
(3) GBS value for money report. 3g (NBS) and satellite (RBS) are midband only
(4) Next Generation Access; estimated minimum €1.5Bn

The shocking state of broadband in Ireland

For many years now IrelandOffline have called for the proper provision of broadband throughout Ireland. We have made much of the sad and sorry state of the provision of broadband throughout rural Ireland (and indeed urban Ireland). Slow speeds and rotting telephone lines leading to pathetic speeds for consumers throughout our republic.

Today we read that the State cannot even provide broadband to it’s own police force, with over 40% of garda stations left unconnected to the PULSE system, leading to the ludicrous situation where policemen (gardaí) have to drive up to a 100 km to enter information into a network enabled computer. Seemingly, almost 300 of the country’s 703 garda stations have no Internet or email access. This is the “information island” not some third world republic, this would be laughable if it were not so serious. The government’s answer is “sure haven’t they got voice communications”.(even third world republics are forging ahead and rolling out fibre networks)

Now the State knows how hollow the words of the Minster Pat Rabbitte are when even the gardai cannot be connected to broadband services. If the gardai are being ignored what will the government do for the multitude of rural dwellers who feel they too cannot get broadband or barely have access to substandard 3G non-broadband technology.

Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “Need we remind the Minister and the government that the provision of broadband was one of the core promises of the Labour and Fine Gael manifestos? Fine Gael promised the NewERA plan which would give Ireland a high-speed broadband network with speeds in the top 5 of the OECD.
Meanwhile Labour promised that they would facilitate the establishment of a new company, NetCo,which would begin the roll-out of next generation broadband.
We are a year into the term of this government and seemingly nothing has been done expect to use the tired, at this stage, excuse of blaming the previous government for everything. C’mon lads it’s been a year now and you need to take ownership of these problems, sure the country languished under previous administrations, but it’s your turn to do something constructive now. ”

Why broadband is important
Investment in broadband is one of the keys to economic recovery in Ireland, certainly in the 21st century no business can function without broadband. Ireland needs to invest now for the future. Booz & Company have shown that countries that have higher broadband penetration rates have achieved up to two per cent higher GDP growth than those with lower penetration rates. In a World Bank report, Broadband Infrastructure Investment in Stimulus Packages: Relevance for Developing Countries (PDF), author, Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang, concluded that “policy makers can wait for serious bottlenecks and areas of insufficient investment to appear before investing, or choose to invest as a way to attract economic activity”.
“In the case of broadband network, the significant time lag between identifying a bottleneck and building a network can forego large economic gains, given its positive spillover and network effects,” she wrote.
“Therefore, timely public spending in broadband infrastructure can realize immediate network effects and bring forward long-term aggregate spillover effects which improve the productivity of the entire economy.”

The privatization of censorship (an Irish SOPA)

Ireland has in its past, had a time of censorship which was rightfully overturned by right thinking politicians. In those more enlightened times certain politicians eventually saw the ultimate futility of censoring James Joyce and hacking feature films to death..
Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “under the bullying of the Content Oligopoly we propose to hand over censorship and public policy to private companies. The probable outcome to this is that the likes of IRMA will now be given control over the websites that Irish people can visit and view.”
Wallace continued : “Those videos of your two year old singing “Happy Birthday” will now be targeted as copyright infringement because Happy Birthday is still in copyright and ditty sung by a 2 year old can grossly infringe that copyright in the eyes of a Content Oligopolist.”

Wallace added “All of this is to be sneaked through, without debate, by Ministerial Order to appease the content companies and their supposed fight against piracy. No discussion in the Dail, no interaction with consumer groups, nothing; just a stroke of a Ministerial pen. This is the low level that our democracy has sunk to. This is redolent of dictatorships of the past.
The exact wording of the legislation hasn’t been shared with us and is being produced in secret, and with the probable helpful assistance of the Content Oligopoly, in the hope that the Irish people will neither understand nor care until it is too late. Even then all considerations of Public Policy making will be kicked to touch, into the courts where instead judges will decide on Public Policy. We could then compare ourselves to the extreme situation that pertains in Belarus where browsing all foreign websites is illegal. This is the slippery slope to corporate censorship. There are no rights of appeal conferred on websites that are to be blocked expect an extremely expensive visit to the High Court with all its attendant exorbitant costs. Innovation on the Internet must be allowed to flourish without hindrance, for the good of the country”

Wallace went on to say “Irish politicians seem to misunderstand the basic concepts of the Internet. The Minister responsible for this can of technical worms is Sean Sherlock TD Minister of State in the Department Of Enterprise, Jobs & Innovation. Blocking sites on the Internet is hardly an innovative step.
Politicians just hear “our business is suffering” from entertainment industry lobbyists so “something has to be done” no matter what the damage to the sensitive digital economy is. It’s the law of unintended consequences at work. We risk destroying our freedoms and our healthy digital environment, possibly jeopardising the investment from companies like Google, Facebook  Amazon, Ebay, Paypal and Twitter, just to keep some dying business that is trying to lash out at what it perceives as doing damage to it’s interests. These Internet  companies will be expected to police postings on their websites in case of some alleged “copyright” infringement otherwise they may find their websites blocked by Irish courts and Irish consumers locked out of the Digital world. Risking inward investment should be a red-line issue just like our corporation tax.

Copyright industries are demanding, through the courts, compensation and a bailout from the government and the citizens of Ireland for the failure of their historical monopoly.This is a bizarre situation“

This regressive legislation will damage current efforts to implement a secure Domain Name Service and damage confidence in the security of the Internet leading to damage to consumers computers due to malware and viruses.
As a measure, it is flawed, as any non technical people do not understand the complexity of the Internet and how any possible enacted measures can be trivially evaded.

This, in all likelihood, is illegal and beyond the Minister’s powers, as it doesn’t seem to take into account the Sabam v. Scarlet jugement which clearly states:
“[filtering] could potentially undermine freedom of information since that system might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications. Indeed, it is not contested that the reply to the question whether a transmission is lawful also depends on the application of statutory exceptions to copyright which vary from one Member State to another. Moreover, in some Member States certain works fall within the public domain or can be posted online free of charge by the authors concerned. “

Wallace went on to say “The Internet is our digital highway and represents the single most important economic, social, and cultural communications tool available to us, we don’t put blocks on the roads to different cities because crime might happen there, indeed not we address the real issue that of crime itself. We accept that artists need to be compensated for their works but the Internet is not the plaything of the Content Oligarchy.
This is a most undemocratic and regressive step, endangering Ireland’s healthy digital economy, jeopardizing inward investment all to prop up a dying business model. It has nothing to do with what consumers want and everything to do with protecting a business based on album sales, vinyl and CDs. Welcome to the 21st century.”

Ireland’s broadband performance slumps
In light of Ireland’s continued decline in the world rankings we in IrelandOffline are calling on the Minister of Communications to put away the continual departmental excuse book and take immediate action to address this dismal performance measurement.

This performance plunge puts us below such Internet luminaries as Moldova,Vietnam, Mongolia since 2010(1) ,Papua New Guinea, Ghana(2) and Kyrgyzstan.

Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “These are countries in transition or developing economies, unlike Ireland which aspires to be in the top tier of countries for Internet access. Patently this will not be the case as our performance is falling quarter by quarter. The Department of Excuses (DECNR) does not seem unduly worried about this disastrous showing, preferring to ‘spin’ and cling to outdated ideologies. Most of the advances in recent reports have been down to work done by UPC in Cities and Large Towns, however the majority of the country suffers from dismal download speeds and this needs to be addressed urgently if we are to have any hope of matching the EU 2020 Vision ‘knowledge economy’ goals”.

Wallace continued: “The digital divide is widening as as shown by the speeds provided by UPC in mostly urban areas compared to the speeds offered by eircom in the rest of the country. The average eircom speed is now only 4.67 Mbps which demonstrates the pitiful and ongoing lack of investment by eircom in the network.”

Outlook for 2012
Below are the issues most likely to be important and affect consumers/businesses in 2012.

Rabbit, Rabbit Rabbit
For nine months now Minister Rabbitte has been involved in “talks” with a carefully selected and limited number of stakeholders, each with their own self-serving agendas to pursue, on how to rollout Next Generation Broadband in the country. These talks are supposed to be in-line with the Digital Agenda for Europe.The Digital Agenda outlines the following:

• Access to basic broadband should be available to all citizens by 2013:
• Access to broadband with speeds of 30 Mbps or above should be available to all

citizens by 2020

Neither of these two goals will be met. 3G is not Broadband, nor will it ever be whatever the promises of LTE. The most common cause of disconnection in 3G is when the cell shrinks under load in the evenings leaving customers with NO signal for hours.

However many of the most important stakeholders have been openly excluded while useless 3G operators are inexplicably included. 3G providers can never deliver anything like 30Mbs no matter what green field produces this week’s thinking in the DCENR. Where are the Fixed Wireless ISPs and the dark fibre providers in these discussions? These infrastructure providers are the operators that will more likely deliver the necessary infrastructure required to satisfy the Digital Agenda for Europe. Fixed wireless uses available spectrum up to eight times more efficiently than 3G mobile midband does. Where are the representatives of consumers/businesses? Nowhere to be seen.

The imminent collapse of eircom

The destruction of eircom is nearly completed, insanely high line rental charges have led to a decline in lines in use. Greedy venture capitalists and bankers have serially destroyed the company. So much for the much trumpeted “fully liberalised market” that was supposed to deliver improvements to the network for the benefit of Ireland.

The looming disaster at eircom as reported in many news reports seems likely in the near future.
The decision by Singapore-based majority shareholder ST Telemedia (STT) not to meet the extended deadline for submitting a modest proposal on the restructuring the company’s €3.7 billion net debt, citing Euro zone instability, has thrown all existing plans into chaos. All that is left are proposals from the various lenders on how to restructure the company. This will likely lead to examinership of the company and ongoing turmoil into 2014.

(1) http://irelandoffline.org/2010/05/what-are-the-mongolians-doing-right/
(2) http://irelandoffline.org/2011/10/what-the-ghanaians-can-teach-the-irish/

IrelandOffline Quarterly Report Q4 2011

The latest Irelandoffline Quarterly report, based as always on Ookla Netindex Data shows Broadband Speeds in Ireland are worse than ever. Ireland has dropped to 53rd place with an average download speed of 7.86 Mbps. Ireland has plunged a catastrophic eight places in the download world rankings in this quarter alone.

This dismal performance rating leaves us behind many Internet luminaries such as Moldova,Vietnam, Mongolia ,Papua New Guinea, Ghana and Kyrgyzstan.

Poor performance is disappointingly accompanied by misleading advertising and high prices.

Ireland is the 5th worst in Europe for under-performance against service promise and the 3rd most expensive in Europe in the service cost per Megabit per second.

In Quarter 4 2011 Ireland’s Position is as follows:

Ireland is  53rd in the World  for Download Speeds and 24th out of 27 in the EU (45th/24th Q3 2011)
Ireland is  71st in the World for Upload Speed  and 24th out of 27 in the EU (72nd/24th Q3 2011)
Ireland is  23rd in the World up for Quality and 18th of *25* in the EU (24th/18th Q3 2011
Ireland is  53rd in the World for  Promise and 23 out of 27 in the EU (45th/24th Q3 2011)
Ireland is  43rd in the World  in cost per Mbps and 25 out of 27 in the EU (New)

IrelandOffline notes that since  our new  Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte assumed office in late Q1 2011 the improvements to Ireland’s Broadband Performance rapidly levelled off and our performance has now gone into full reverse with a drop of eight places in download speeds during the past quarter. We feel that Minister Rabbitte has had quite long enough,  nine months in fact, to learn his Departmental ‘Excuse Book’ off by heart and now the necessity for strong action is required to stem our inevitable slide.

In our Q3 Report, Irelandoffline observed that ”This improvement in cable broadband speeds keeps Ireland largely static in the international tables instead of falling back as expected.”

These improvements have largely tailed off, the limited launch of eircom Fibre to the Home and to the Kerb Products during the past quarter had no measurable effect on eircom performance   and we are  falling down the rankings again simply because competitor nations continue to systematically invest and improve as compared to the mess Minister Rabbitte presides over.

The Urban Rural divide as implied by the gap between UPC and eircom continues to grow. The average UPC customer enjoyed three times the speed of the average eircom customer in Q4 2010 and the performance gap in Q4 2011 now shows UPC is on average over four times faster than eircom.. This improvement in cable broadband speeds kept Ireland largely static in the international tables over much of the year but can no longer deliver a sufficient performance to keep us static in International Comparison tables.

Table of Download Speeds ( in Mbits) UPC vs Eircom

UPC       Eircom      UPC/Eircom Ratio
Dec 2010     12.21       4.01                     3.04
Mar   2011    14.4         4.4                       3.27
June 2011    17.62       4.59                     3.84
Sept 2011    18.11        4.57                     3.96
Dec  2011    18.84       4.66                     4.04

Recently cabled towns, typically towns with populations between 10,000 and 30,000 are now vastly outperforming  our main cities which are the main employment centres. UPC cable is largely confined to residential areas rather than core employment centres in the cities.

The fastest speeds in Ireland are in Dungarvan County Waterford where the local cable ISP, Casey Cablevision (not measured), now deliver average speeds of 23.09mbits. In second place nationally is Athlone  on 17.48 mbits and Swords Co. Dublin  has dropped to from second place in Q3 to  third in Q4 on 15.12 mbits.

The top 10 Towns have an average speed of 13.16mbits in Q4 up from 12.64mbits in Q3 2011

Ireland’s top ten cities/towns and download speeds
1 Athlone        17.48 Mbps
2 Swords         15.12 Mbps
3 Celbridge         14.12 Mbps
4 Waterford         13.60 Mbps
5 Clonmel        12.35 Mbps
6 Lucan         12.24 Mbps
7 Greystones         11.89 Mbps
8 Maynooth         11.78 Mbps
9 Tallaght         11.62 Mbps
10 Mullingar         11.11 Mbps

As ever none of the big Cities are in the top 10. Dublin is in 13th place on 9.54mbits and Cork is in  20th place on 8.33mbits in Q4. Dublin has nevertheless dropped to 13th fastest overall in Q4 from 12th fastest in Q3.

Average eircom speeds in Dublin and Cork  all increased but average UPC speeds increased by a notably greater amount.

Table Showing Operator Speeds In The Main Cities, Q4 2011.

EU Download Speeds Q4 2011.

EU Upload Speeds Q4 2011
EU Download Speed Performance Gap
Google Netindex Visualisation (Select Download Speeds) January 2008 (Source)

Google Netindex Visualisation (Select Download Speeds) November 2011 (Source)

UPC Speed Comparison.

While UPC speeds continue to rise in Ireland they are also rising in other UPC Territories in the EU. UPC Ireland is much slower than UPC in Holland Germany and Austria.

Notes:

Click on an INDIVIDUAL country inside a listing for City and ISP Statistical Drilldowns.

Download Index http://www.netindex.com/download/
World (All Countries) http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/
EU http://www.netindex.com/download/1,7/EU/
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IrelandOffline, a leading consumer advocacy group in telecommunications warmly welcomes the announcement that a major transatlantic fibre will be landing at Belmullet in County Mayo. The cable is low latency (sub 60ms) and is a huge increase in the inter-connectivity into Ireland. The route this cable takes is only 5200Kms which is the shortest route across the Atlantic. The fibre consists of 100 x 100 Gbps per Fiber Pair (60Tbit Total Design Capacity and is Future Proofed)
Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “This is a great day for Ireland as this fibre cable will bring much needed international transatlantic traffic to Ireland. The cable will be a low latency cable and follows the “Great Circle route” which is the shortest transatlantic route by far. This is the optimal route across the Atlantic and cables should follow this route in future. Low latency is a key driver in international e-commerce and financial trading between major financial centres. This shows the importance of the west coast of Ireland as a landing point for trans-Atlantic fibre transit. We in IrelandOffline look forward to more fibres making landfall in this region and to the region becoming a hotspot for international connectivity”
Wallace continued : “The landing of this fibre outlines how Ireland is now well served for  international traffic, we now have two new cables between Dublin and Wales coming online which will allows for cheap and rapid transit across the Irish Sea. The Welsh regional authorities have installed a fibre to connect these  to the UK core fibre network. This will allow very fast transit across the UK to London and Europe”

Wallace went on to say : “Now all we need to do to utilize this fantastic interconnectivity available to us is to improve the dark fibre provision throughout the State. Building a National Dark Fibre network  will help access in the local access network (the network that connects homes to local POPs and the MANs). This is now an urgent priority for Ireland Inc if we want to advance into the digital age and to benefit all the hard-pressed consumers of Ireland. Limited fibre rollouts (to a few isolated towns) and building stranded MAN networks with no backhaul is not a proper solution.  How is Ireland to benefit from this new digital age if the New Era (and Labours equivalent) are to be left on the shelf and ignored? If we do not do this we risk falling behind,  the likes of China(1) and Brazil(2) are building Next Generation Networks so should we.”

Minister Rabbitte is to present the results of his ‘New Era’ discussions with a very small list of stakeholders in the Irish Telecommunications sphere this December. Levelling out access between regions and to Dublin through the removal of barriers to market entry must be the starting point otherwise this latest talking shop in the DCENR will go the way of most of its predecessor deliberations, i.e. into oblivion and sit on a shelf somewhere.

(1) http://www.telecoms.com/30287/alcatel-lucent-selected-for-broadband-china-fibre-cities-project/
(2) http://itdecs.com/2011/07/brazil-tech-the-national-broadband-plan/