IrelandOffline very much welcome the formal announcement this morning of a joint venture between the ESB and Vodafone(JV) to roll out broadband to a number of towns in Ireland. Any expansion of high quality broadband to areas outside of the major urban centres is to be welcomed. We do however caution though that this rollout is not the panacea to the lack of broadband in rural Ireland. This may be tackled at a later date. What do we know? The JV : Will target towns where there are more than 4000 buildings Some Fibre to the building will be included...

National Broadband Plan Map IrelandOffline welcome to recent announcement of a National Broadband Plan(1) as finally the futility of prior attempts at a “national plan” have been shown to be abject failures. We would like to take this opportunity to announce our presentation of a map that outlines which villages/areas that are to be included, as outlined in departmental documents. The map will allow the user to quickly identify areas that are to be included using a simple map type display. The user can map NBP villages by constituency and some other metrics which also allows the user to identify...

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...