Landline Penetration in Ireland Drops Below 50%

Landline Penetration in Ireland Drops Below 50%

IrelandOffline have examined the latest figure from eircom and observe that the latest results state that they now only have 999,000 residential customers down some 108,000 or 10% on the year.(1) Ireland has 2.04m homes. (2)

Eamonn Wallace,Chairman of IrelandOffline  notes “This equates to a landline penetration of under 50% which is by far the lowest in the developed world. This is unsurprising as eircom line rental is the highest in the whole world and has been so since 2003.  As late as 1998, shortly before privatisation, landline penetration was around 90% of households.”

Wallace calls on “eircom/Comreg to immediately reduce the line rental to the OECD average. Nothing is served by having such insanely high line rental and very soon only rural and small town Ireland will be the only ones paying this absurdly high line rental when urban areas migrate to VDSL (which is free of line rental) and cable. eircom have lost around 400,000 Residential customers in less than 5 years. The chickens of incredibly high line rental cost have come home to roost.”

Wallace further observed that “landline penetration in Greece is, we understand, now higher than  Ireland and indeed OTE, the Greek incumbent has higher broadband speeds  than eircom.” (4)(5)

Of the remaining 1 million homes that today have an eircom line at least 300,000 of these lines are paid for by the taxpayer through benefit schemes for pensioners,carers and those on disability.(3)

visualisation of the current trends:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=emi9ik86jcuic_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=i91&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:FR:DE:IE:GR:GB&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false&icfg

Source International Telecommunications Union

References.
1) http;//pressroom.eircom.net/press_releases/article/eircom_Announces_Full_Year_Results_30_June_2012_/
2) http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/Prelim%20complete.pdf ( page 17)
3) http://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2011-12-13.1391.0&s=household+benefits+package+eircom#g1395.0.r
4) http://www.netindex.com/download/2,22/Greece/
5) http://www.netindex.com/download/2,49/Ireland/