News

Ireland’s best kept secret The Rural broadband Scheme was sneaked out in a Press Release and an announcement on the Department’s website on the 9th of May. We have to wonder at the absurdity of this step…surely the people without broadband will not be able to read the website in the first place as the scheme is supposedly designed to deliver a basic broadband service to those people. As it stands now they do not have broadband and therefore cannot access the website. Sir Humphrey (Yes Minister) himself would be proud of the administrative elegance displayed by the announcement. The...

Shortly, possibly even as soon as September 2011, IrelandOffline expect to see another fine Comreg mess, possibly the finest mess of all. It will be in the form of the fifth public mobile licensing round(1) Despite their having presided over three of these public licensing rounds themselves it seems that Comreg essentially know nothing about mobile technology and couldn’t care less about the end user. But this time it really matters. The reason it really matters is because Comreg propose to turn off the most successful and widely available mobile service in early 2013 and have evidently not thought through...

Dear Pat, We know you have been awfully busy with the first 100 days of government, and all that, and we are releasing this on day 93 of the 100. We are sure your civil servants have snowed you under with reams and reams of elegiac and unctuous paperwork explaining why they can do nothing and why they will do nothing for their country. They are past masters at producing sumptuous can’t do and won’t do memos. You must be awfully tired by now having to read yourself into all of them. We’d be delighted to help you understand the...

Irelandoffline Demands Immediate Restatement of Deliberate 3G Coverage Misinformation Supplied by Comreg to EU for the years 2009 and 2010. Irelandoffline has analysed the data provided by National Regulators to the EU in respect of the EU Digital Agenda ( i2010) and we will be publishing our greatly expanded BB Speedtest quarterly report in time for the 1st EU Digital Assembly meeting in less than a fortnight. The most important data is the Coverage data. We looked at three key measures which are: 1. Fixed Broadband Coverage by Population Nationally 92.7% in 2010 (1) 2. Fixed Broadband Coverage By Population...

Dear Pat, IrelandOffline has studied data on Investment By The Telecommunications Industry in Ireland as supplied by Comreg/DCENR to the OECD and as separately supplied to The EU Commission. We have found some glaring discrepancies and most particularly in the data supplied by Comreg/DCENR to the OECD over the past decade. These discrepancies deliberately overstate Investment in Telecommunications in Ireland by around $1bn or near enough 2 average years of real investment by the Irish Telecommunications industry over the period in question to 2007. It is a gross overstatement. NOW is the time to: a) Correct the dataset for the...