The First Tuesday folks put on an pretty interesting event which pulled together a good set of speakers to discuss telecoms and more specifically broadband issues effecting Ireland – always a good topic to tease out emotive opinions.
The first speaker was Minister Eamon Ryan who in my opinion shows considerable more passion for developing the communications sector, than some of his predecessors have shown, although let’s judge him on progress. I found it great to hear that he is proposing to run public consultation of the development of internet/broadband in Ireland, using a social network. Wow! This must help give more people a say in public consultation. I’m not sure how many people participate in written consultation processes, but it is painfully slow and cumbersome, which means that probably only the well resourced commercial enterprises have the resources to influence. Making it easy for everyone to have their say must be a good thing, so I can’t wait. I’ve had a quick look at the DCENR website and can find no mention of this, so hopefully we will learn more soon.
The policy aspects of the Minister’s speech attracted a bit more discussion – “speed is not important” which although was the direct quote, was caveated by “but ubiquity is important”. The example to prove this was that the Minister’s blackberry didn’t function in S. Korea, where most homes have 100Mbps broadband. My own view is that speed is becoming more and more important, with loads of web video, conferencing, streaming HD etc, and that Ireland could easily be left behind again, without a good dollop of affordable hi-speed, at least in the main cities.
Next up was Peter O’Connel of eircom. (Disclosure – I only left eircom a few months back). Peter gave a very pragmatic view to explain that there was little point blaming the existing owners of eircom for the possible lack of investment in the network during the period of multiple corporate transactions (I mostly agree, although the ESOT have been around since the first IPO and have benefited along the way). To their credit, the new owners are investing in network rollout (€350m pa, or half of total investment in telco in Ireland), in an environment where Babcock and Brown are getting a hammering from their shareholders. At the end of Peter’s talk, the Chairman started back on the legacy of “value being extracted from eircom during the various disposals”. This lead to great entertainment and some fascinating reaction – Peter took to the podium to rant about this negative “looking back attitude”, had a shot at the Minister for ignoring speed as a requirement, and called upon all stakeholders to work out a suitable industry structure and regulatory environment to promote investment in broadband. Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? But what a reaction – I was gob-smacked to hear long-standing eircom bashers such as Sean Melly and John Nagle jump to eircom’s defence. This was great stuff. Tommy McCabe of IBEC promised that the debate would continue at the TIF conference in October. It might well be entertaining, but it would need to be to justify the €350 fee!
Some serious points were also thrown in by John Holland of Ericsson. John explained that p2p usage was a problem for everyone, in that those heavy p2p users hog most of the bandwidth, without paying anything extra. While this has worked to date, the capacity to cope isn’t being deployed by operators as they don’t generate any additional return – which means the quality of service will deteriorate for all. John pointed out that this means caps on usage will have to come into play, with the heavy users paying extra for the privilege. This argument makes some sense, so we may seem more telco’s and ISP’s following Comcasts approach, reported here.
PS. John Holland is a big supporter of the Niall Mellon Township Trust, which is a terrific initiate to build homes for those who need them in South Africa. You can sponsor John here.
Tags: broadband, DCENR, eircom, ericsson, niall mellon, telco
[...] Minister Eamon Ryan to use Bebo and Facebook for consultation feedback? Read that and how eircom had a barney with him about speeds at campbell’s blog. [...]