Part 2: Farewell, Dermot, the Minister for Communications who had a lot of good intentions.

Part two of the letter is about Broadband availability. You want to go over the Eircom advertisement with your mouse cursor to see the truth behind it!



The Truth about DSL Availability

All your government spending on broadband uptake promotion, on developing e-government portals etc makes only sense if the population can actually avail of broadband.

So you believed Eircom, when they lied to their shareholders and the public in full-page newspaper adverts and in their Annual report, claiming to have 1 million broadband lines enabled, "making this technology available to the large majority of our customers"?

Eircom also lied to the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland, when they responded to the ASAI’s investigation with the claim that these over 1 million lines (which merely originate from broadband enabled exchanges) "are all capable of running broadband", when Eircom was fully aware that at least 20% (Eircom’s own later admission) or 24% (as you claim) or 30% (as others, who have access to the database claim) of those lines fail for broadband, are not capable of carrying broadband.
Comreg, who were aware of the failure rate, did not deem it necessary to correct the public misconception created by Eircom. Indeed John Doherty gave internal orders not to answer media questions about line failures, but deflect them by stating these failures would "happen with rate adaptive dsl."
Misinformation about Irish Broadband availability even managed to creep into the impeccable stats of forfas/National Competitiveness Council.



The NCC uses this 2003 Broadband availability stat to highlight the dire state we are in. It does not show the real facts. There was no 60% dsl availability in 2003. We’ll not even have it in 2004 or 2005.
In March 2005, when most EU-15 countries will be at a 85% to 100% level, Eircom will have dsl enabled the exchanges of towns bigger than 1500, that is 200 out of 1000 exchanges.
61% of households are in these areas, 49 % are outside (CSO figures 2002). With a line failure rate of 20%, as Eircom acknowledges, only 48.8 % of Irish households will have dsl Broadband available, with a failure rate of 30% it’s only 42.7% of Irish households, who will get broadband through their telephone line.
There will be some minor additional Broadband availability through wireless providers, including those of the group broadband scheme, through cable and some families living outside of, but on the fringes of towns will also get dsl.

Question: What is your Regulator doing to achieve the goal you’ve set for him, to bring Irish Broadband availability to at least the EU-15 average?

Answer: All the wrong things.

Resources:

Funny and sad: Nobody even noticed this hilarious Aertel number cock-up. But in the end it was an apt metaphor for Dermot's mis-use of figures in that interview.

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