Down the Bunny Hole – Department of Communications' Adventures in OECD Wonderland

Dear Noel,

What your DCMNR guys are up to in advanced misinformation almost puts our own spin experts to shame.
Just don't overdo it so blatantly as in that presentation to the OECD at a conference in Portugal late last year.
Someone might expose it to the Irish public. And how would you then justify this obvious misinformation?
Or have you followed ComReg down the bunnyhole and started to believe your own spin?

Regards

John

P.S.: Have a look at a few comments I put together about the DCMNR presentation!



Slicing through misinformation
(The full DCMNR presentation, given on the 26th October 2004 at an OECD conference in Porto, can be downloaded as a pdf file here; or from the OECD website covering the event.)
Slide no 3 of the presentation in Porto, supposedly setting out the government objectives:


Let's go through the "information" on the slide slice by slice:


You are not really still suggesting this? There are 30 member states in the OECD. To get to a place in the top 10%, we'd need to be in one of the first three places. Which country will we replace? South Korea, the Netherlands or Denmark?


If you meant to change the government's goals to "within the top 10 OECD countries", then say so. But there is no chance of reaching that goal either – as long as we in ComReg have the say.


"14% market penetration" is utter nonsense, a fog grenade directly out of Eircom's spin-doctor arsenal.
Broadband connectivity is universally measured and compared as "broadband connections per 100 inhabitants". The ten leading OECD countries have a broadband penetration of over 15 "broadband connections/100", as of end 2004. 196,000 broadband customers will not even give us a broadband penetration of 5 "broadband connections/100".


Dream on! Even if the world stood still around us, we would neither make it into the top 10% of OECD countries, nor into the top ten OECD country league by end 2007. To get to 15 broadband connections/100 we would need to have more than 600,000 broadband connections by end 2007, or a consistent weekly increase of nearly 4,000 each week from now on.
As the other countries do not stagnate at their 2004 level of broadband penetration, even a consistant 4,000 per week growth – and we are nowhere near that – would not bring us into the top 10 country league.


Whom are you kidding with these useless figures? Yourself?
Ireland's net broadband increase, although we went through a period of satisfying pent-up demand, is not even at the average OECD increase:



Our overall Internet usage is stagnating at a dismal below 40% level (only 37% of Irish households are connected to the Internet in some way), because we as the regulator failed to introduce flat rate dial-up broadband in 1998 when it was prudent, or in 2003 when we had been belatedly directed to do so by Minister Dermot Ahern.


Running out of red marker for further "slicing", just a few comments on the second last slide which states what Ireland will achieve by the end of 2006:

* "500,000 customers [by the end of 2006]": To reach this, we would need to see a weekly rate of around 5,500 new broadband connections from now (mid October 2005) onwards. We are not seeing anything like that happening.

* "120 MANs delivering open access." So far the MANs failed to have a noticable impact on the situation. And what's worse: So far nobody can explain how the loops of optic fibre dug underneath the footpaths and roads of the smaller towns can be put to usage. The fact that the cable was put down "in time" and "in budget" cannot rectify the fundamental design flaw with them.

* "150 GBS projects." How many connections will come from them?

* "Broadband in 4,200 schools and spun out into these communities." What about the fact that 40% of Irish schools will get a satellite connection? Telling about the state of real broadband availability in Ireland.
Spun out into these communities? There is no spin out, the group broadband schemes and the school scheme were not integrated. The impact of the scheme will be hampered by lack of computer equipment of schools and a lack of integration of broadband/Internet usage into the curriculum.

* "State networks." No change really visible. Still costing more for any connectivity within Ireland than from Dublin to wherever in the world.

* "Centre of excellence for advance technology trials." We better keep schtum about those, shall we?

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