When will this NBS fantasy end? Consumer lobby group IrelandOffline today slammed the Government’s broadband policies saying they’re insufficient to keep Ireland competitive. The reliance on the failed National Broadband Scheme, while a charming name, is simply not meeting the basic requirements of “broadband for all”. Below are the basic specifications of the scheme, as outlined by the Department. Few customers, if any, actually receive the specified speeds, these minimum requirements are in fact almost impossible to deliver using 3G technologies. The only reason the government is cheer leading on this subject is so they can include these figures from...

Is Next Generation Broadband a pig in a poke? IrelandOffline have recently examined a very large Speed Test data series from Ookla Netindex (speedtest.net) and we believe the Next Generation Broadband product does not live up to the hype. In fact it is just the same old technology dressed up with a marketing facelift. We were stunned to see average broadband speeds dropping in Dublin since March 2010 and have come to the inescapable conclusion that the eircom Next Generation Broadband Fibre Power rollout is the direct cause of this slowdown. The Next Generation Broadband rollout started in March and...

Ireland’s Broadband Performance Deteriorates Alarmingly Over The Summer In May 2010 IrelandOffline issued shocking research(1) showing that Ireland was grossly under performing in terms of download speeds, upload speeds and overall quality. We were quite dismayed to find that not only was Ireland then in 41st position in the world for Download speeds and that Mongolia had leapt past us into 38th position. We also called on Minister Ryan to abandon the RTÉ studios,where he spends far too much of his time nowadays,and to return to his desk and thence to work. In any other developed country a steady fall...

This is probably the first attempt by any government in a developed country to directly tax the victims of its own policy failures for the policy failures. People paying for motor tax by post or over the counter are to face penalties as part of a bid to drive more business online proposes the Local Government Efficiency Review Group (LGERG). Online services would cut costs to the taxpayer and increase efficiency, according to the recent LGERG report. Among the chief targets for these further cost-savings were motor tax, advertisements and planning applications.This simply demonstrates how arrogant and out of touch...

NewSpeak in telecommunications marketing When is unlimited not unlimited? When it is offered by an Irish Telco. IrelandOffline are today calling for an end to the misleading practice of describing telecommunications packages as unlimited. We now have a plethora of “unlimited” offerings by various telcos yet they all have limits. They are now hidden behind a “Fair Use Policy”. These supposedly “unlimited” offerings stretch the use of the English language to the extreme. Unlimited by definition means exactly that: unlimited not some falsely crippled offering. For instance, Imagine’s Wimax offering is advertised as unlimited yet has a cleverly hidden 30Gbyte...