Net Results:Broadband is back in the news, with a Dáil special committee report noting that things must change, and more international surveys showing just how far down the pecking order we are, writes Karlin Lillington
Not that this is anything new. We have always been near the bottom of such surveys because we got into each new level of the internet game late and reluctantly.
Note I did not say "broadband game". Our laggard status with broadband mirrors Ireland's sluggish adoption of dial-up internet. We started out with some good prospects. When home internet connections first became available in the 1990s, we had an explosion of competition, with internet service providers (ISPs) popping up everywhere.
But they all had a big problem: Eircom. The national operator controlled the way in which they could offer internet connectivity and the prices they could charge. Eventually the sector saw consolidation, and, tellingly, most of the main ISPs ended up being bought and run by the various network operators. However, Eircom (then Telecom Éireann) still held the reins.
As a result, in this crucial period of internet adoption, even as our economy began to take off with, ironically, the technology industry a significant part of the activity, we plodded along with extremely low levels of home net penetration. Businesses did little better.
At the time, I was doing some work writing web page content and still remember with some disbelief a trip to talk to a major international accountancy firm about what it wanted on its Irish site. They only had five business e-mail addresses. Five! And they employed hundreds of people and were part of a global conglomerate.
Anyone remember the wait for always-on, flat-rate internet offerings? Our lack of same had the knock-on effect of hobbling demand for broadband when it did finally arrive, because no one was used to thinking about utilising an always-on connection.
Just when we were finally getting flat-rate internet offerings, we were being lapped in the internet race by nations moving on to broadband's high-speed connections.
We have been overtaken by developing world countries and eastern European countries with tattered infrastructure emerging from years of Soviet rule.
How little things have changed. Each international broadband report that comes out these days only reiterates our enduringly lowly status, behind developing world dictatorships and remote coral atoll nations.
And now we have a Dáil report saying "needs to do better". Not only do we need to do better, we need to realise that the world has moved on again and just getting your basic "one meg up" DSL or wireless line rolled out across the country is no longer going to cut it. Nor is eight megs, or even 24.
Consider Britain, which has one of Europe's highest rates of broadband penetration, at 50 per cent of homes. As the Guardian'sVic Keegan noted, the issue (as in Ireland) isn't getting more broadband on to more of the existing, old, copper line network. It's laying fibre to the door.
So while BT talks of upping speeds to 24 megabits per second of data transfer by 2012, France is already trialling 100Mbps on fibre. We face a worse challenge. A regulator weaker than its British peer still cannot push through significant change on the copper wire front. And we need fibre, not more copper services, anyway.
The Irish Government was right to get fibre into place with initiatives like the Municipal Area Networks that surround numerous Irish towns and cities - but management of these needs to be rethought. We need joined-up networks, utilising unused "dark fibre" networks already in the ground and pushing incentives to install more. We need more Government-driven incentives to get online. We need a fierce regulator. We need subsidised city wireless networks. And the State needs to be ruthless in transforming our existing copper network to fibre.
