What The Ghanaians Can Teach The Irish! Eamonn Wallace Chairman of IrelandOffline wishes to remind Pat Rabbitte that under Section 13 of the Communications Regulation Act 2002(1)  it is possible for a minister to give a policy direction to Comreg. No other Minister since Dermot Ahern has given such a statutory direction. We sincerely hope that Minister Rabbitte will prove to be a different and decisive Minister? One  that looks after the interests of Irish consumers, the forgotten voice in the NewERA planning. Information recently received by IrelandOffline suggests that eircom is finally switching all its Fixed Wireless Access (FWA)...

IrelandOffline Quarterly Report Q3 2011 The latest Irelandoffline Quarterly report, based as always on Ookla Netindex Data shows Broadband Speeds in Ireland are improving but only at a glacial rate in the last quarter and with a marginal relative drop in download speeds against our EU competitor countries. In Q3 2011 Ireland’s Position is as follows. Ireland is 72nd in the World for Upload Speeds and 24th out of 27 in the EU (79th in Q2 2011) Ireland is 45th in the World for Download Speeds and 23rd out of 27 in the EU (49th in Q2 2011) Ireland is...

IrelandOffline has performed a technical capacity analysis on total satellite broadband throughput metrics in recent weeks. This analysis was conducted once Hylas-1 and Ka-Sat went live. Hylas-1 and Ka-Sat between them more than quadrupled satellite “broadband” capacity in Ireland. IrelandOffline has come to the inescapable conclusion that the total capacity of all satellite broadband providers operating in Ireland is less than the backhaul available to the rather small Roscahill exchange in County Galway and indeed that of many small rural exchanges. Satellite is an ideal broadcast mechanism for television but owing to natural constraints it is not suitable for large...

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...