Eamon Ryan – Hatchetman for Fianna Fail
Eamon Ryan – Thief of future of rural broadband
Eamon Ryan – Doing more damage than Fianna Fáil ever did
Eamon Ryan – Making people appreciate Noel Dempsey as a Minister
Eamon Ryan – Bad for your broadband health
Pick any of those headlines, they all apply.
It’s bad enough that a once respectable politican joined a Government with the devil and took the Fianna Fail boilerplate for broadband excuses and perverted them to new lows and along the way had an Irish Times journalist join in further damaging Ireland by making misleading claims to the public about broadband but recent actions from Eamon Ryan have shown that he has done more damage to broadband in Ireland than any Minister before him.
Eamon Ryan has now killed the weak future that broadband in rural areas once had. He’s done this by dishonestly pushing the National Broadband tender further and further into the future while also this week removing the little funding that broadband rollout had and also quoted OECD figures which were NOT OECD figures to make him look good. Not only has Eamon done a hatchet job on broadband funding, he has knived the back of the rural population in Ireland with his actions. If Eamon was Minister in absentia, he’d be doing less damage. It’s terrifying to think it but the old Fianna Fáil and PD Government were better for broadband than the new greener Government.
People said give the Greens a chance, give them time, wait another while. It’s obvious now to me that we’re witnessing Stockholm syndrome from the Greens. Come next election I’ll do as much as I can to ensure that locally here in Cork anyone but Dan Boyle will get my vote and the vote of as many other people in Cork South Central as I can. This is not merely selling out, this is the murdering of a broadband scheme just for power.
If any green shows up at my door again I will set the dogs on them.
This man obviously does not give a damn about Rural Ireland. We have waited so long for any form of decent communications better than the 16k dialup rubbish we get out here.
Back up the wagon…. I agree he has mis-used the stats, he has also messed around with the policies. However, if you look here –
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/wireless-broadband-providers-in-cork/#comment-111685
you’ll see an interesting thread (I think you had an input to it??) which illustrates that there is plenty of bb on offer but the problem is price and technology. There is one telling comment – about dsl ‘nude’ a technology which is ‘outlawed’ in Ireland, which illustrates neatly the issue. Ryan needs to be taken aside and have explained to him what happens elsewhere, where the incumbent has been properly integrated into the offer, not allowed to dominate it.
My impression of him is that he is prepared to listen, his briefing from the dept heads will, of course, be designed to defend their actions.
Bye, Barry
[…] How the Green Party and Eamon Ryan are doing more damage to broadband than FF ever did […]
Again, not a defense of Ryan per se but in a recent broad based interview – http://ffinder.businessworld.ie/GreenParty/sunday/00000606.htm
He said –
My own experience in everyday life is that I use my mobile phone to ring other people on their mobile phones. Yes, I use fixed line DSL in terms of my home broadband.
Q. But isn’t that copper DSL still the key issue?
Eircom still has the bulk of the home fixed line market.
Yes. Despite there being 100,000 fixed wireless subscriptions, there are 600,000 fixed line broadband subscriptions and that’s either Eircom or services sub-let by Eircom.
But cable is now starting to be a significant player. Go back to the principle of competition: it is a much more competitive market now because in that fixed line broadband area, the cable, wireless, fixed line and 3G operators are competing, in my mind.
We’re starting to see prices come down, although not as fast as I’d like.
Q. Do you think that in a couple of years, we won’t have a situation where one company still has the large bulk of the residential broadband market?
Obviously Eircom has a big advantage in terms of having that network. And it’s a huge advantage, particularly in urban areas, where you can upgrade your network to higher speeds, such as VDSL.
I think in Ireland there will be two different tech developments.
One is for that 60 per cent of the country which is in an urban area where there is that competition between fixed line cable and wireless.
And then there is the more rural 40 per cent of the country where it is more likely that it will be mixed – fixed line and possibly other technologies such as 3G or satellite or possibly Wimax.
So in answer to your question, it may be that different technological solutions will apply, or different market responses will apply in different parts of the country.
[he doesn’t say anything about altering the technical terms of ComReg’s relationship with eircom though….]
Bye, Barry