Damien Mulley

There’s a very clever chap on Boards.ie who has spotted that Eamon Ryan is now changing his boiler plate replies on broadband and the National Broadband Scheme. Where once the Minister said all those in broadbandless areas would be getting broadband now he is saying something slightly different but it changes the whole nature of the National Broadband Scheme:

All requests for a broadband service in the areas to be addressed by the NBS will be met.

See that? But the NBS map has been changing constantly. Actively moving the goalposts that.

I asked for the below question to be asked of the Minister during PQs but it looks like it has not been asked/answered as yet but if it does get asked it might clarify the smog the Minister is creating on this issue:

Will the National Broadband Scheme cover all areas currently not served by broadband suppliers in Ireland, excluding satellite providers. What areas will not be covered by the National Broadband Scheme? given the maps have been redrawn since the intial map was released, increasing the areas that are not being served by broadband.

Meanwhile Simon Coveney finally (it wasn’t rocket science or complex math) caught Ryan on the rollout times for the National Broadband Scheme:

Deputy Simon Coveney: If contracts are being signed in November and if there is a 22-month roll-out period, can we safely assume that the Government target for universal broadband provision across the country will now be the end of 2010 rather than the end of 2009?

Ryan replied:

The national broadband scheme has taken slightly longer than we would have liked. My hope is that the detailed work that has gone into the preparation of the contract in advance, whoever the bidder is, will mean we will have swift roll-out and delivery on the commitment within it by mid-2010, which is the rough timeline set out.

(The bit not in italics is where he is lying)
Planning permission. Lots and lots of applications for planning permission in all these places. Hills, mountains, rough terrain. Masts and digging and all that. What sane company is going to apply for planning permission for masts BEFORE they win the tender? They have told this to the Department I am quite sure of, they’re not stupid. They have told the Minister of this too. If Dan Boyle is anyone to go by, Eamon Ryan, being the best guy in the whole wide world to know broadband (awww shucks thanks Bouncy) knows this too yet he tells the Dáil otherwise. He tells them somehow these companies can fast-track things? Oh would you come back down from the clouds Minister.

Ryan also lies about schools to Simon Coveney:

Deputy Eamon Ryan: Some 3,901 out of 3,936 schools have their local broadband connectivity installed, which is over 99% of them. Installation has typically been at speeds of up to 2 megabytes per second.

Of up to. Theoretical. Half of these are via a shitty satellite dish. Sat. A. Lite. Eam mon. There is no ugrade path to fibre with Sat. A. Lite. Sat. A. Lite is for Ethiopia. That’s in that hot place. It’s useless for a whole school. Useless for a whole classroom. Last resort Internet access and half the schools in the scheme get it.

Lots of delays lots of lies. Status quo. I’m going to bed before I go on a rampage. Another post about Eamon Ryan gets autoposted later today.

To summarise the event in one sentence: We all want fibre-like broadband and we want it everywhere but we’re fucked infrastructure wise.

And now follows a longer summary:
I previously wrote about how Eamon Ryan put a half-day open forum together on Next Generation Broadband. He even went on Boards.ie to announce it. I got to go along, along with Damien Callan from Bleep.ie and a few other folks including general consumers and people from Boards.ie. The structure was a room with 14 tables and around each table were civil servants, telco people, people from the EU, consumers/campaigners and other interested parties. In other words, a very good mix, though it all depended on who was at your table. Some fantastic minds happened to be at mine.

Photo owned by jnpk1979 (cc)

It was almost table-quiz in structure as we were given table questions to consider and give answers to over a number of rounds. Each table had someone that would then communicate what the table had decided. Some were good and feedback from people after told me some had their agenda already set and gave that.

Mostly the topics dealt with state assets, future trends, the best way to get everyone broadband, the digital divide etc. Some of the questions were stupid though such as asking to decide on a max and minimum speed by 2010, 2015 and further. Really! Jesus. Targets once set have most energy around them dedicated to rigging them as I happily pointed out to the Dept of Comms rep at the table. (big fan of you by the way dude, love your memos that I got under FOI.) The rep’s Department have lied for years about broadband levels and every Minister with them. Whatever someone wants was my answer and our aim should not be a speed because every prediction has been beyong wrong, it should be whatever the person or business wants. 100Mb, no problem, a gig, no problem. I argued strongly for that.

Then came a typically backwards-thinking question and one that gets my brainblood boiling: What is the killer app for broadband? Dedicating time to figuring out a “killer app” for a medium is wasteful and isn’t addressing the issue. What’s the killer app for water? What’s the killer app for electricity? See, they’re utilities, they don’t need killer apps. (David Isenberg points to a Jupiter survey that shows people will stop going to the movies and paying for movie channels well before giving up their Net) “The killer app” for broadband (were it to exist) is broadband. A free and open pipe and have the world build things in, on and around it.

Photo owned by iwona_kellie (cc)

After the tablequizims, there were breakout sessions to discuss various things and then we all came back together to discuss the results of them. And then something odd happened, despite the whole general feeling of the day about needing of more speeds and better connections the Assistant Secretary General of the Department of Communications stood up and summarised the day and the state of Ireland and said that from the day we see people don’t need or use fast broadband connections and sure all they do is send emails anyway. Planet Nothere called and want their spacer back. Maybe he’s a nice guy, I hear he is but stating that nobody uses their 20mb connection for anything more than email is devoid of reality or just a plain fucking lie and it’s obvious that the Department can do that very well.

So was it just a talking shop? some of the Boards.ie people think so. I don’t. It made the Civil Service do something new: Meet reality and the people that exist there. Not the telco people either but real Joe and Joanna Soaps. Happily ignoring people from an Ivory Tower and only interacting via highly controlled paper consultations didn’t happen. Real people spoke and shared.

What needed to happen though was that everyone there agreed on a todo list for the Department and the Department had to go off and carry some of them out and report back in 3 months. Reality-based todos that can be done, so at least it’s better than nothing at all. Action points were needed. Let’s hope if there is a next time it will have them.

Meeting the EU today in ComReg HQ to tell them how shit ComReg are and how lame the Dept of Comms are. Then over to Dublin Castle for this shindig with Eamon Ryan ringleading it. The rockstars, the hasbeens and the neverwillbes of Irish telecoms will be there as well as general consumers and those representing as many demographics as possible. I’ll try to liveblog from it if I can. I hope it’s constructive. I already hear the IBEC lot are put up a united front.

It’s apt that this survey from the EU showing how bad Ireland is came out yesterday.

And also that we may get a super telecoms regulator for the EU.

ComReg are running a conference on the Digital Divide on Wednesday where EU Commissioner Viviane Reding will talk and probably talk more about this super-regulator. Naturally I didn’t get invited. It seems perverse that we have a Comms Minister who actually rings me and invites me to events despite not agreeing on a whole lot and the “independent” telecoms regulator does their best to pretend I don’t exist.

News just coming in. Confirmed with them too. No reasons for doing so yet. The final tender was meant to be decided by Autumn so this is cutting it close. The Department go on hols (just like the Courts) in the next while too. BT Ireland will still be the tech partner for Three who along with eircom are the only ones left in the tender process.

Not sure will the Department be as happy with a two horse race and them leaving this late into it. I wonder what changed recently?

Update: Irish Times coverage.

A BT spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that it had withdrawn “due to the lack of spectrum being made available” for the scheme.

BT planned to provide coverage using a wireless technology called WiMax. Industry sources said that 10Mhz of radio spectrum was being made available for the NBS.

Following a technical analysis, BT found this was not sufficient as it would have required a large number of base stations to provide the broadband speeds required by the Department of Communications.