News

IrelandOffline give a cautious welcome to the announcement (1) of fibre optic cables being driven into the community for those forgotten rural parts of Ireland, any effort to drive fibre optic cables deeper into the country, is a move in the right direction for any aspiring “advanced” country.. Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said “Given previous false dawns, we would be be very slow to accept this announcement at face value. Previous schemes have promised much but delivered virtually nothing in terms of infrastructure. The Press Release is notably missing the following short simple sentence: “We will DELIVER fibre TO...

At this time the death of a telephone linesman is on our minds, Michael O’Riordan was re-erecting a pole that had been brought down by the recent storms and as they were erecting it, it fell, striking him on the head. This focused our minds on all the unsung heroes of these storms, the men who went out in extreme weather to restore services to thousands of people all along the west coast, we also have to include the fearless ESB crews in this note too. We’d like to publically thank these brave men who ventured out in those extreme...

Background Every other week it is clearly outlined in writing that the Minister of Communications has no role in communications policy, whatsoever,  so we as ever  wonder what is the point of a Minister being “in charge” of a department that has no evident function according to their own Minister.(1) Minister for the Utterly Bizarre(2) In a written answer straight from the “ Ministry of Truth” we see Minister Rabbitte openly admitting that his department is pointless and has no role in communications policy in Ireland. The logical conclusion is that we abolish the Department of Communications as it  does...

Mr Howlin, Mr Reilly, meet Mr Rabbitte!   Recently the Department of Enterprise and Reform demonstrated clearly why Government is not engaging in ‘joined-up’. thinking. The department used six pages of its public service reform document [1] to outline its dreams for future e-government. Paragraph after paragraph of laudable yet wishful thinking. Amidst it all, we were stunned to learn that “Technology moves forward at high speed”. Drivel that it is, it is not true when it comes to essential communications infrastructure in rural Ireland. The Minister Howlin has seemingly not stepped out of his ministerial bubble in years. The...

From the desk of Pat Rabbitte (Minister, Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources; Dublin South West, Labour) The broadband service contracted under National Broadband Scheme (NBS) is a basic, affordable, scalable product in keeping with EU State Aid clearance for the Scheme in September 2007. Under the terms of the contract which my Department has in place with Hutchison 3G Ireland Ltd (trading as “3”), the NBS mobile wireless service currently offers minimum download and upload speeds of 2.3Mbps and 1.4Mbps, respectively, subject to a maximum contention ratio of 18:1. The NBS satellite service, which is utilised in a small number of cases for technical...