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...

What are the Mongolians Doing Right? Today IrelandOffline are calling on Minister Eamon Ryan to deliver concrete actions to get Irish Internet Speed and Quality up to that of Mongolia. Commenting on the results of this global survey Eamonn Wallace Chairman of IrelandOffline said: “He cannot do this from the RTÉ studios. We want him back working at his desk and dealing effectively with this Mongolian problem. First Soweto outpaced Dublin and now Mongolia has overtaken Ireland. Urgent action is required of you Minister. ” Test Metric company Ookla released their six monthly speedtest.net results. Ookla have carried out no...

The National Broadband Scheme. A Ghost Broadband System for our Ghost Estates. 3 Ireland have silently announced that they are unilaterally changing the terms of the NBS contract. They will be dropping the data allowance for customers from 15GB a month of data down to 10GB of data. This clearly demonstrates that the 3 Ireland network is not capable of handling the data throughput required for the NBS and highlights in general the unsuitability of any 3G network to handle the large volumes of data required for such a network to be considered as real broadband. In our opinion this...

Price gouging comes to Dublin eircom today have announced their “Next Generation Broadband” promising speeds of up to 8MB to all subscribers, they claim to have also finally addressed the contention issue (which they call congestion). What is not in the headlines is the subtle but important change from a speed based model to a usage based model of charging. The announcement Let us be clear on this announcement, this is neither Next Generation anything nor will 8 MB be delivered to the vast majority of hapless consumers. While IrelandOffline welcome the attention to the important issue of contention we...

The recently published report by the Innovation Taskforce1 has singled out Ireland’s broadband situation as a critical priority in need of investment if innovation is to be enabled and exploited. The authors of the report identify a number of sectors for innovative opportunities and all of them are communications sensitive. IrelandOffline has been campaigning for many years for improved broadband services and has welcomed the suggestions made by the high-level group. Amongst the suggestions that IrelandOffline considers essential is that all public infrastructure include provision for shared ducting for communications services. The Innovation Taskforce includes the following recommendation “provision of...