IrelandOffline

The National Broadband Scheme. A Ghost Broadband System for our Ghost Estates. 3 Ireland have silently announced that they are unilaterally changing the terms of the NBS contract. They will be dropping the data allowance for customers from 15GB a month of data down to 10GB of data. This clearly demonstrates that the 3 Ireland network is not capable of handling the data throughput required for the NBS and highlights in general the unsuitability of any 3G network to handle the large volumes of data required for such a network to be considered as real broadband. In our opinion this...

Price gouging comes to Dublin eircom today have announced their “Next Generation Broadband” promising speeds of up to 8MB to all subscribers, they claim to have also finally addressed the contention issue (which they call congestion). What is not in the headlines is the subtle but important change from a speed based model to a usage based model of charging. The announcement Let us be clear on this announcement, this is neither Next Generation anything nor will 8 MB be delivered to the vast majority of hapless consumers. While IrelandOffline welcome the attention to the important issue of contention we...

The recently published report by the Innovation Taskforce1 has singled out Ireland’s broadband situation as a critical priority in need of investment if innovation is to be enabled and exploited. The authors of the report identify a number of sectors for innovative opportunities and all of them are communications sensitive. IrelandOffline has been campaigning for many years for improved broadband services and has welcomed the suggestions made by the high-level group. Amongst the suggestions that IrelandOffline considers essential is that all public infrastructure include provision for shared ducting for communications services. The Innovation Taskforce includes the following recommendation “provision of...

Ireland Has the Highest Percentage of Slow Internet Connections in Europe. The quarterly speed survey released today by Akamai1, the company that actually delivers windows patches to your computer every month, has found that Ireland has: 1. The Highest percentage of SLOW connections in Europe at 3.4%2. 2. The 4th lowest percentage of FAST connections over 5mbits in Europe at 9.4%3 Commenting on the results IrelandOffline Chairman Eamonn Wallace said: “This is utterly unsurprising to us given the sheer number of Dialup and Midband 3G mobile connections in Ireland. The leading countries in this survey all have wide scale fibre...

IrelandOffline question the commitment of the Minister to Irish broadband consumers IrelandOffline recently did some research on the Irish governments website http://www.broadband.gov.ie and particularly on the supplier list.(1) We ask Minister Ryan to explain the grossly inaccurate and out of date website his department runs. This shows how low Broadband Provision to Irish People is on the Minister’s priority list. This shoddy and grossly out of date website is beyond a joke in 2010. 75% of the listed suppliers no longer exist. Many went out of business before the end of 2008. About 1/4 of the suppliers actually exist, many...