Just because you scored a girl once, doesn’t make you’re a stud, just because it’s theoretically possible to get broadband speeds on a modem from 3, O2 or Vodafone doesn’t mean you have a broadband connection. But why let the truth get in the way of a report from the telecoms poodle, right?
ComReg today said there are 222,330 mobile broadband connections in Ireland as of last quarter. Here’s something to try: Publish monthly results of speeds tests on their networks from various locations. See what happens.
Minister Eamon Ryan congratulates ComReg on a telecoms market in Ireland which collectively lies about what a broadband connection is. Heckuva job there Comregy. The Dept of Comms, ComReg and the telcos are never going to question each other when they’re all benefiting from not opening their books to see the real speeds of their services. I chatted to Minister Ryan before the Summer and put this to him and suggested he instruct ComReg to run monthly speeds tests on all the networks and publish the results. Until this happens I’m certainly not going to have any respect for these figures and the offices that tout them.
Dave sent this on and is just doing a Pavlov’s Dog test on me I think. 🙂
This isn’t Pavlov’s dog. It’s ComReg:
Photo owned by charkesw (cc)
Ahh, the telecoms self-delusion continues. Wireless services have been touted as useful solutions (not always – trees are a problem apparently), as have the dongles.
I’ve used both. My fixed-wireless broadband service was up and down like the bishop’s trousers. The connection speeds I get with my vodafone dongle are as erratic as a thing that is very erratic. On a good day, when no one else with a 3G phone or dongle is within 50 miles, I can get 1MB just about.
One question I would ask is how many of the people with dongles have them as an addition to their normal broadband service as a back-up or to use when travelling. When you spend 2.5hrs a day each way on the train, being able to get online while travelling allows you to stay productive (after a fashion). And then the second question is what is the average connection speed from different locations.
Reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. What is the average airspeed of a laden swallow?
The Three dongle isn’t actually that bad, considering cost and convenience. Very handy for traveling, of course, but I used it as my primary connection for a while, and it really wasn’t horrible.
Surprisingly low latency, too; on a good day, less than 100ms.
(By the way, speeds of between 200kbits and 3mbits (though only on Sunday nights) in Christchurch. Better in rural areas.)
Streaming video comes to a shuttering halt in the evenings..some connection speed
Is that a an African swallow or a European swallow?
It’s similar to stats showing all households connected to an upgraded exchange as “broadband enabled”….
Well at least I’m able to surf the web with my crappy 3 3G mobile broadband connection, thats more than I can say for my 8MB DSL line…. its still fucked up. I finally got an e-mail back from tech support, nearly two weeks after emailing them. “Oh, this isn’t our problem, its something got to do with Eircom… check out boards.ie if you don’t believe me”. Awww booo fucking hoo, maybe I’ll get my daddy to go around and smack their bumbums for you. Jesus fucking christ, they answer my problem by telling me one of their own!!
It’s not an eircom issue, got this from BT themselves this evening.
Took ten seconds to load this page with my Three mobile dongle.
Why do we have a regulator at all?? , can we abolish this quango ??
Thank you Aidan for getting the reference. I fear that it is a European swallow.. not so good, and prone to interference from trees and days of the week featuring a “Y”.
@Rob Synott.. I live in a rural area (only the ESB seem to have realised that the population in my village in wexford has more than tripled in the last 5 years). My vodafone dongle is at best a zen buddhist training tool… I spend a lot of time pondering the concept of nothing while waiting for mulley.net to load. Rumour has it that the local eircom exchange will be upgraded by end of next month. Breath. Me. Holding. Not. Rearrange.
My best vodafone broadband speeds have been logged on the Dublin to Rosslare train just north of Arklow. After that I’m looking for a carrier pigeon who can do mime.
Also interesting is that to qualify for mobile broadband the operators count anyone who has download any thing through the network in the past 3 months (longer in the case of some providers). David Tyler’s comments (by way of Piaras Kelly) about the 02 experience really make the point that access means squat.
In this he quotes comments by O2 UK that only 1.8% of non-iPhone users get through more than 25MB of data usage a month (iPhone users are hugely different with 60%). Therefore, using the 1.8% (ignoring the iPhone) we should probably be saying the mobile broadband connection for all intensive purposes this about 4,000 people. Not as impressive as the DCENR numbers.
PK – why let statistics and facts get in the way of a good press release?
In fairness to mobile broadband, I’ve been testing my iPhone 3G speeds versus my home eircom connection and the 3G has won almost every time.
Got the Three dongle, total pants in Dublin city, took it back before the trial period expires over 2 weeks ago and still waiting on my ‘deposit’ back. It’s now with the finance office.
Seen this??
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/11451/
extract –
“Writing to Reding, the director of regulatory affairs at Smart Telecom told the fiery EU telecoms commissioner that LLU in Ireland has been a total failure, with only 19,000 unbundled paths in the entire Irish market.
This is despite very significant investments by various licensed operators — in Smart’s case some €60m.
In a letter seen by siliconrepublic.com, Quinn wrote: “The result of the failure of LLU is a lack of choice for consumers, a lack of innovation, a lack of new investment in LLU and consequently an incumbent operator with a constant retail market share of 70pc of the retail DSL market and over 95pc of the entire DSL market in relation to retail and wholesale bitstream services (both of which are almost identical from a consumer perspective).”
wonder if it will make any fucking difference?
Bye, Barry