News

Publish the Report Ireland Offline calls on Minister Rabbitte to publish the report of the Broadband Taskforce before his department makes another irreparable blunder. Late (yet again) The report of the Broadband Taskforce, first proposed by Noel Dempsey in 2007, will be concluded, according to Minister Rabbitte, by Saint Patrick’s Day 2012. While this is about five years later than former minister Dempsey anticipated and ten years too late by the standards of any other country apart from Greece perhaps, it is already three months later than Minister Rabbitte himself promised only nine months ago. Are we then to be...

The shocking state of broadband in Ireland For many years now IrelandOffline have called for the proper provision of broadband throughout Ireland. We have made much of the sad and sorry state of the provision of broadband throughout rural Ireland (and indeed urban Ireland). Slow speeds and rotting telephone lines leading to pathetic speeds for consumers throughout our republic. Today we read that the State cannot even provide broadband to it’s own police force, with over 40% of garda stations left unconnected to the PULSE system, leading to the ludicrous situation where policemen (gardaí) have to drive up to a...

The privatization of censorship (an Irish SOPA) Ireland has in its past, had a time of censorship which was rightfully overturned by right thinking politicians. In those more enlightened times certain politicians eventually saw the ultimate futility of censoring James Joyce and hacking feature films to death.. Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “under the bullying of the Content Oligopoly we propose to hand over censorship and public policy to private companies. The probable outcome to this is that the likes of IRMA will now be given control over the websites that Irish people can visit and view.” Wallace...

Ireland’s broadband performance slumps In light of Ireland’s continued decline in the world rankings we in IrelandOffline are calling on the Minister of Communications to put away the continual departmental excuse book and take immediate action to address this dismal performance measurement. This performance plunge puts us below such Internet luminaries as Moldova,Vietnam, Mongolia since 2010(1) ,Papua New Guinea, Ghana(2) and Kyrgyzstan. Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “These are countries in transition or developing economies, unlike Ireland which aspires to be in the top tier of countries for Internet access. Patently this will not be the case as...

IrelandOffline Quarterly Report Q4 2011 The latest Irelandoffline Quarterly report, based as always on Ookla Netindex Data shows Broadband Speeds in Ireland are worse than ever. Ireland has dropped to 53rd place with an average download speed of 7.86 Mbps. Ireland has plunged a catastrophic eight places in the download world rankings in this quarter alone. This dismal performance rating leaves us behind many Internet luminaries such as Moldova,Vietnam, Mongolia ,Papua New Guinea, Ghana and Kyrgyzstan. Poor performance is disappointingly accompanied by misleading advertising and high prices. Ireland is the 5th worst in Europe for under-performance against service promise and...