TechWire

NTL's 20Mbs, no-limit, €40 broadband from July 1st

Is this the advent of 'real' broadband in the country? Here's today's press release:

"UPC, parent company of cable operators Chorus ntl, has today announced that it is introducing radically higher broadband speeds of 20Mb for Irish customers. This will be the fastest and best value broadband service available in the Irish marketplace and will propel Ireland from 25^th to 10^th place on the OECD broadband speed league.

"UPC will roll out the new 20Mb broadband service from July 1 to over 422,000 broadband enabled homes in areas such as Dublin, Galway, Waterford, Limerick, Cork and all other major cabled towns. The new 20Mb broadband service has been introduced by UPC to meet the increasing demand for higher speeds to support on-line applications such as video streaming and the sharing of multimedia files such as photos, films and games.

"UPC is offering 20Mb broadband for just €40 a month, making it the best value offering in Ireland. This is 8Mb quicker and substantially cheaper than the nearest equivalent service provided by Eircom, who can currently only offer a top speed of 12Mb to business customers for the significant sum of €204.49 per month.

"From July, all new UPC customers who sign up for our €40 service will receive a market leading downstream of 20Mb. Customers who sign up for our €30 product will get 10Mb and for €20 will get 3Mb. Our commitment to deliver real broadband isn't just about downstream speed. Our upstream for the 20Mb tier will be 1.5Mb and we are removing our download caps on both the 10Mb and 20Mb services. This gives the improved UPC broadband offering clear advantages right across the board."

Comments? Views?

Some notes about Vodafone's new fixed line broadband service

1. Its three free unlimited calls to Vodafone numbers are only free up to 59 minutes. According to Fionnuala Coburn, head of fixed line services in Eircom, you have to hang up and redial once an hour to derive the free call benefit.

2. You can't get just one bill for your mobile and fixed line Vodafone services, a deliberate move, according to Coburn: "we looked at our research and found that people regard their mobile phone service as a personal thing, separate from their fixed line". Hmmm…

3. What advantage does a Vodafone customer have in opting for a 2Mbs broadband product over a (putative) 3.6Mbs mobile broadband service? Coburn suggested that "heavy downloading" is better facilitated by fixed line broadband. When asked about the higher stated speeds for its own mobile broadband service, she said: "my understanding is that the mobile broadband experience does vary. I'm not sure what the average speed there is." That's code, really, for 'mobile broadband is not reliably close to 3Mbs'.

4. Am still a little baffled as to why Vodafone is going into this fixed line market. It can only be a long term strategic decision not to be excluded from the main infrastructure (as a stakeholder), if there's ever a massive carve-up of the network.

Mobile broadband speeds

I don't always see eye-to-eye with Damien on broadband take-up in the country, but he does have a point when it comes to mobile broadband services not being what they're made out to be. (As does Michele.) Vodafone sales clerks, for example, tell their customers that it's up to 3.6Mbs. "That's all of Dublin and anywhere there's good 3G coverage, which is 75 per cent of the country," one told me over the phone just this morning. In fact, it's never 3.6Mbs. Or anywhere near it. It rarely reaches even 1Mbs in my experience.

Eircom's 25Mbs broadband plans

Spent an hour and a half with Geoff Shakespeare, Eircom's chief technical officer on Tuesday. In a nutshell, Eircom is pledging to upgrade a third of its broadband lines to VDSL (25Mbs to 100Mbs) by 2010. It will also, he says, upgrade "well over half" of all its broadband lines to ADSL 2 standard (12Mbs to 24Mbs) in the same time period.

Ryan on broadband, Eircom, MANs

Spent 45 minutes with Eamon Ryan in his office yesterday (interview to appear in Sunday's paper). He said the state was committed to "ubiquitous" broadband, even if it had to be permanently subsidised. He said a few other interesting things, including thoughts on "leapfrogging" certain unscheduled towns and areas into phase 2 of the MANs.

Reality check of the day

"While the majority of [Irish] businesses have a broadband connection, 68% of businesses do not think that they operate applications which specifically require a broadband connection."
(Chambers Ireland survey of 611 businesses, July 2007)

Isn't it time to admit that the majority of us are too unsophisticated to 'get' broadband?

Valentia Island's new broadband service

I spoke for a while yeterday to John McKeown, who has set up a wireless broadband service in Valentia called Skellig Broadband. They offer 1Mbs connections (512k up) for €36 per month plus €300 in set-up installation costs. He said they can't really make money out of it but hope to expand the service into a ring from Dingle all the way down to the Beara Peninsula (Castletownbere).

Broadband coverage map of Ireland

Sorry to harp on about this, but I wonder whether this broadband map -- from a government website -- is accurate? It shows areas already covered by broadband and 'imminent' coverage (as of May, 2007). Look at Donegal! According to Eircom, by the way, about 82 per cent of phone lines in the country are now broadband enabled.

Less than 3 per cent of Boards.ie heads say they can't access broadband

-- According to an ongoing survey on its site. Interesting that the sample is nice and large: 302 people and counting. And it's also interesting that this is usually a forum for hotheaded dissent on broadband availability. I'm really beginning to think that the whole 'broadband availability' theme is a little overdone...

Broadband availability question/challenge

Okay, here's a question: are there any Irish companies that cannot get access to broadband? Or even punters? Please leave a comment, saying where you're located...