Irish Broadband Speeds Continue Their Decline

Irish Broadband Speeds Continue Their Decline

IrelandOffline Quarterly Broadband Speed and Quality Survey Q4 2010

The steady decline in Irish Broadband speeds and quality continues to decline under the regime of Minister Ryan’s watch. An overriding belief exists that accepts that substandard satellite is an acceptable solution to their many policy failures.

In this quarter it is now the turn of Vietnam and Macedonia to overtake Ireland for average download speeds after Mongolia went past us in May and as the rest of the developed world continues to power away from us. Recently, Albania overtook us for upload speeds.

We are no longer a first world country but seemingly a third world economy and with the “Smart” and “Green” communications infrastructure to match our status.

The provision of high quality broadband is a key driver of economic growth, even in developing countries, and our minimum requirement to be the equal to that of our nearest competitors.

Download speeds in Ireland are now less than HALF the EU Average which is 11.37mbits
Upload speeds in Ireland are just over one third of the EU Average which is 2.82mbits

Average Irish DOWNLOAD speeds have declined from 5.94mbits to 5.51mbits since May 2010.

It is probable that if the Cable Broadband subscribers in the larger towns are subtracted, that average download speeds are closer to 3Mbps across the rest of the country. The average UPC Cable customer can download 3 times faster than the average eircom Next Generation customer. 12.21mbits versus 4.01mbits and with mobile broadband customers getting under 2mbits.

Upload speeds have held steady at 0.97mbits from 0.94mbits in May 2010.

The Quality Metric has shown a slight improvement since May 2010

We were 41st in the World for download speeds in May 2010. The country NOW occupying 41st position in the world, Malta, has an average Broadband speed almost 2mbits higher than Ireland does today. In order to stand still in 41st place in the world we in Ireland should have increased our average download speed by just over 1.5mbits where it declined instead by nearly 0.5mbits.

Since May 2010 we have dropped out of the Global Top 50 for download speeds and out of the Global Top 60 for upload speeds and we continue to decline.

Ireland is now:

55th for download speeds down from 51st for Download Speeds in September (down from 41st in May)
75th for upload speeds down from 70th for Upload Speeds in September (down from 63rd in May)
56th for Broadband Quality up from 59th for Broadband Quality in September (and up from 63rd in May)

Speaking about these findings Eamonn Wallace chairman of IrelandOffline said “This continues to show that the policy of relying on unreliable mobile “midband” products does nothing for the consumers of Ireland. A system that cannot guarantee minimum speeds to consumers is not a suitable replacement for fixed “line” broadband across the lesser served areas of the country. The only reasonable solution is a fibre optic deployment and the lack of fibre optic cables needs to be addressed urgently”

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Notes

September press release http://irelandoffline.org/2010/09/ireland%e2%80%99s-broadband-performance-deteriorates-alarmingly-over-the-summer/

May press release http://irelandoffline.org/2010/05/what-are-the-mongolians-doing-right/
Download Speed http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/
Upload Speed http://www.netindex.com/upload/allcountries/
Broadband Quality http://www.netindex.com/quality/allcountries/