IrelandOffline

News / Opinion

Virgin Media – pirates of suburbia

Another Study Shockingly Discovers That Cable TV Needs To Compete On Price from our “well-duh” department For the last decade the cable and broadcast industry (Sky now Comcast) and UPC (now rebranded Virgin Media) have gone to great lengths to deny that cord cutting (dropping traditional cable tv for streaming alternatives and/or piracy) is real. First, we were told repeatedly that the phenomenon wasn’t happening at all. Next, the industry acknowledged that, certainly, a handful of people were ditching cable, but it didn’t matter because the people doing so were losers living in their mom’s basement. Then, we were told...

News / Press Releases

What we know (so far)…

Is the NBP now dead? Today we discuss a project which is shrouded in secrecy and now a political controversy about the suitability of a Minister having private chats with the remaining bidder for the NBP has erupted, the big imponderable question is “where next”? Here’s a short recap on what we know so far, a more detailed document is available here and is available as a separate post on our website Secrecy The freedom of information process is fundamentally flawed, questions are often met with open hostility and sometimes even threats of litigation for allegedly making “vexatious and frivolous...

News

What we know

On November 23rd 2016 Mr Naughten, Mr Donohoe Mr, McManus (Chairman Eircom) and Mr Robert Watt (SG Dept PER) had meetings in the Department of Public Expenditure. FOI’s to DPER seeking a note of the meetings turned up nothing – apparently no notes exist. Separately we asked DCCAE by means of a series of questions submitted to the Joint Oireachtas Committee whether any of their officials had attended that meeting with Mr Naughten. They responded that none had. Shortly after the November meeting, history relates that the Eircom 300K program throttled-up and the subsequent agreement dated April 4th 2017 confirms...

News

Results of an AIE request

Today IrelandOffline are publishing the results of an AIE request for records associated with the Department’s approval of the Eircom 300K network announced on 7th April 2017. But first a bit of context. The so-called 300K network was first proposed by Eircom on June 4th 2015. Subsequently technical and financial criteria were established by which to judge the credibility of ‘planned investments’ such as this one. Minister Alex White dismissed Eircom’s plan in December of that year. The same 300k premises scheme was reactivated in 2016, it seems that those same narrow tests were reapplied. It could have been expected...