Businesses in the north-west have highlighted problems with broadband telecommunications in the region, saying the lack of a loop system means there is no back-up in the event of a failure on the line.
At an IBEC seminar in Bundoran yesterday, the IT manager of a US company based in Letterkenny said its entire staff had to be sent home last Monday week when the line failed for nearly 11 hours.
Mr Matthew Erskine of Pacificare International Ltd said the company lost $12,000 (#13,444) per hour while the line was down. On five occasions over the past two years, the line had been down for more than two hours, he added.
He warned that the parent company in the US would begin to question its continued presence in Letterkenny if this were to happen regularly.
Problems with the service were also highlighted by Mr Mike McCrohan, the computer operations and network manager with the North Western Health Board. "We should not be at the mercy of a JCB in Mullingar," Mr McCrohan said.
Mr Erskine said Pacificare would incur even greater losses in the future if complete breakdowns continued to occur. The company, which has been in Letterkenny for two years, employs 175 people in processing health insurance claims and 168 more staff are to be taken on after a recently-announced expansion.
Eircom representative, Ms Helen Stanton, defended the company's decision to pull out of a £29 million (#37 million) investment in the Border, Midlands and Western (BMW) region. The project, which was included in the National Development Plan, was aimed at closing the "digital divide" between Dublin and the regions, and the Government planned to reimburse £10 million of the investment to Eircom.
Ms Stanton, manager of regulatory affairs with Eircom, said it was "unfortunate" that the project, which qualified for EU structural funding, was not going ahead. But the decision had to be seen in the context of substantial spending by Eircom in the region.
Mr Niall O Donnochu from the Department of Public Enterprise said a report was being carried out to identify "barren spots" around the regions and the money not taken up by Eircom would still be available.
