“Shock” announcement from Eir In a thoroughly anticipated “shock” announcement, eir the state’s largest telecoms provider, today (31st January 2018) announced their withdrawal from the government sponsored National Broadband Plan citing regulatory, governance and commercial issues. To watchers and analysts of the plan it has been clear for many months that the plan was in serious trouble. Today the funeral of the plan was announced. Once SIRO, the other serious bidder, announced their withdrawal last September the death knell of the National Broadband Plan had been sounded. The “noises” coming recently from the new owners of eir were that they...

On April 5th last, a third party FOI request (journalist) was made to the Department of Communications concerning the department’s analysis of the impact of removing 300,575 premises from the National Broadband Plan state intervention and further forbearing to compete with Eircom in the supply of broadband to those premises for a given period. Following a query to the Department from IrelandOffline seeking a copy of their response to the FOI request, the Department published their response on their website on 31st August. Of the 83 records in scope all but one were refused, in the process using up to...

It’s now nearly 4 months since Minister Naughten agreed his deal with Eircom – the so-called ‘300K Network’. We’ve given our views on it already, however the reaction of the remaining bidders has been strangely muted. Sure, ALTO (the alternative operators group) have been critical and said so to ComReg, but apart from some unattributable grumbling, SIRO and enet, have avoided commenting on the record. To be clear, this idiotic deal will potentially unravel six long years of planning and leave the NBP solely to Eircom, whose miserly record of investment in rural Ireland since 1999 is a matter of public...

Irish Mobile Phone Coverage has SHRUNK YET AGAIN in 2016. IrelandOffline regularly warned in the period between 2010 and 2012 that there was a serious risk that mobile phone coverage would shrink catastrophically in Ireland once the mobile phone licences were sold off in December 2012. This is exactly what happened, especially in 2013 and 2014. Commenting on this Eamonn Wallace (Chair of IrelandOffline) said “Furthermore the state took many hundreds of millions for these licences and cannot make the operators ‘unshrink’ the coverage as they would be sued. So what does Denis Naughten do, he invites the Irish Countrywomen’s...