Lovers of eighties’ TV will remember ‘Endurance’ the Japanese game show in which desperate students had their nipples seared with a magnifying glass, or had their heads powdered with fish food before being dunked in a river full of carp. On a similar theme of desperation and humiliation, eir (the company formerly known as eircom) has launched a competition of its own that combines broadband-misery, special pleading, and queue-jumping. It’s called “FibrePower your Community”; we’ve called it “Grovel”. Grovel hopefuls will submit details of their community in a written application accompanied by  “your own words, song, video or indeed a...

Introduction We in IrelandOffline have been following the recent announcements about broadband delivery in Ireland with great interest and we have even attended some of the press events. Seemingly we will all have fibre to the home by 2020, well so says the government and they have even drawn up a plan to make this happen, this is called the National broadband Plan (NBP). We believe this to be a very good and aspirational plan, despite the long timescale. Current announcements In tandem with the announcement of the NBP we also have a number of companies jockeying to be overall...

The National Broadband Plan Irelandoffline would like to give the DCENR team who built the http://broadband.gov.ie/ mapping site that was launched yesterday some kudos for a job well done. By the standards of the output produced by DCENR over the years this is an astonishingly complete and accurate piece of work. We were extremely worried when a frankly incoherent list was quickly announced by Minister Rabbitte just before the local elections but as it turns out we need not have been. Some opportunities have been missed. The ability to send a geolocated query direct from the map, perhaps with a...