Below are the minutes for the joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications meeting on their broadband report. They dragged in E-net, Smart Telecom, BT, eircom, ComReg and Noel Dempsey and subjected some of them to a very tough line of questioning. Word doc version of this.
The most interesting section for me is when Isolde Goggin, John Doherty and Mike Byrne are questioned. We have our regulator telling an Oireachtas Committee that our line failure rate is in line with the rest of Europe and that us and Northern Ireland are pretty much the same for line failure. That’s an outright lie. Why is our regulator lieing to the Oireachtas?
They go on to protect eircom by saying they are fulfilling their licence obligations for the only national wireless broadband licence despite the fact 200 people or less use the service and the service is not advertised. If you ring eircom they won’t sell you the service either. They say it isn’t available to you in your area. ComReg won’t publish a map of where this service is available despite it being a requirement of the licence agreement. Compare that to Chorus who had their licences for wireless broadband removed and more recently ComReg taking the 3G licence back off Smart Telecom.
Jesus H Christ! Did you have to paste that straight into the blog!
Damien, this is interesting reading.
There are some porkies in there. I wonder who briefs these senior execs on technology. Knowledge gaps all over here for people who claim to be Smart’er.
Where are BT, Colt, Chorus/NTL, Verizon, Access, Magnet and others in this??
Disproportionate analysis by the committee.
[…] Damien Mulley […]
Deadly, politics+technology = interesting article, especially with the terrible estate of politics+technology here.
By the way, could you put the transcript in a [more…] link, because it slows down the page and it’s cumbersome to find the entries under this post. 🙂
David, I have done now as it broke my feed too.