Stop feeding the beast On Tuesday last the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications played host to a delegation from the Association of Alternative Telecommunications Operators (ALTO) a trade association of ten telco operators all of whom are not Eir. The presentation followed a well ordered scheme with the Vodafone representative talking about investment ‘risk’, the Sky guy about regulation and BT’s man explaining the games that can be played with, for example, address matching. The problem This is essentially the same problem as 10 years ago as outlined by this contribution: “Wholesale connection charges in the Irish market are more...

The Department’s ongoing struggle with transparency Back in February in advance of a meeting between Department officials and the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, we sent the committee a list of questions which we thought might help to reveal the logic behind some of the decisions Minister Denis Naughten had made over the last two years. In all we asked 47 questions concerning, the agreement with Eircom Ltd. on the ‘300K Network’, the extension of the enet concessions (and their timing), the protracted market and operational reviews of the Metropolitan Area Networks . The Committee forwarded the questions to Department...

Comreg, the telecoms Chihuahua Here at IrelandOffline we’ve decided to return to a topic we have discussed many times before. The “so-called activities” of the Telecommunications watchdog(1). Eamonn Wallace, Chairman of IrelandOffline said : “Their activities affect every single business and consumer right across the country yet nothing ever happens, nobody examines the topic, in fact we’d call it an outright scandal. The essential point is that our telecoms regulator and the “regulated entity” seem to be colluding together to keep wholesale and backhaul prices at extremely high levels and these high prices affect every single telecommunications user in a...

“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...