News

The race for inward investment hots up Northern Ireland To Get over 20 Times More Fibre Than The South by 2011.(1) Inward investment is a hot topic in these stressful times and any direct challenge to our ability to attract this valuable inward investment needs to be addressed as a matter of utmost urgency. In early 2007 eircom, announced an unambitious and limited project where they committed to installing 240 fibre nodes across the state over 3 years, largely as they were enabling further exchanges for DSL.(2) In comparison this week, Northern Ireland announced 1150 new BT fibre nodes(3) by...

Ireland Bottom of Another Bandwidth-Driven pile. A survey released today by Tariff Consultancy1 has revealed that Ireland is now the most expensive country in Europe in which to lease Data Centre capacity. After getting a broadband connection the first reaction of most people and companies is to establish a presence on the internet, usually a web site. However the cost of renting space in a datacentre is prohibitive. This shocking report is a result of a myriad of policy failings over the medium term since around 2001, not only in the lack of an overall balanced National Broadband policy but...

In Depth Harvard University Survey Damns Ireland The prestigious Berkman Centre for Internet and Society in Harvard University1 was commissioned by the US Telecoms Regulator the FCC to carry out an in depth survey of Internet connectivity in 30 OECD countries, published on the 13th of October. Yet again this report shows that we are stuck in less than broadband mediocrity. This is a very thorough report. We in Ireland Offline are particularly agitated by the table on page 58 and titled Table 3.4. Country rankings on various speed measures 3 and based on real life user speed. Measurements in...

International Broadband Quality Survey blasts Dublin. IrelandOffline today received their copy of the “Oxford University Said Business School Global Broadband Quality Study” which is issued annually. Commenting on the results of the study Eamonn Wallace of IrelandOffline said “We are not quite sure whether this is Salvador in Brazil or Salvador in El Salvador but this city is now ranked as the 86th City in the world for the quality of its Broadband Infrastructure and is one place ahead of Dublin in 87th place for the Quality of its Broadband” (1) Cities ranked ahead of Dublin include Ankara, Ljubljana, Bratislava,...