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...

Dear Minister Rabbitte, IrelandOffline notes with utter dismay the headlines about elderly people and the disabled living in fear of their telephones allowance being cut off and leaving them in probable danger and perhaps helpless as a consequence. The Department of Communications have utterly failed to protect old and vulnerable people, irrespective of any particular technology. So-called “experts” in the Department have long been aware of roaming agreements which is the most suitable way of deploying mobile phones in rural areas and can maximise the signal coverage in very rural areas with low user bases. However these “experts” in the...

57 plus questions; not one answer The mapping process for the The National Broadband Plan is underway. Its stated purpose is to map areas of the country that either currently have, or will have by July 2016, alternatively Next Generation Access (NGA) or ‘basic broadband’. The process then should, in theory, reveal those areas without NGA or indeed basic broadband (of which there are many). While the ten month delay in getting started is inexplicable, the most urgent issue now is to ensure that proper standards are applied to each service. Some of these services will be of unknown quality...

IrelandOffline today read with great bemusement the figures that have emanated from Comeg Towers(1). We note with utter hilarity the lack of basic mathematical skills displayed. Eamonn Wallace,Chairman of IrelandOffline commented “A headline rate of 65% household broadband penetration would put us way, way above countries with proper infrastructure like Korea or Switzerland, plainly this is fantastical.(3) Figure 3.4.2.” Wallace commenting on the figures: “However the document actually contradicts this: The fixed broadband per capita penetration rate was given as 24.4% in  Q2 2013”(3) Figure 3.4.1  These figures are  based on a population base of 4,598,600 from the Central Statistics...