Ireland trails in OECD broadband ranks

Ireland is still trailing other countries when it comes to broadband, the latest figures from the OECD show.

The latest data ranked Ireland at 20 out of a table 30 countries for households with broadband access in 2008, with almost 43 per cent using the high-speed internet connection.

Businesses fare slightly better, with more than 95 per cent of companies with between 10 and 49 employees with high speed broadband access, and from 99.2 per cent upwards for larger firms.

Ireland has a total of 950,082 broadband subscribers, as of June this year, according to the report.

In the Dáil in November, Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan said more than 65 per cent of households were now connected to broadband.

A push to roll out broadband services to all areas of the country has been promised; however, there are still some regions that are not served by existing services. The National Broadband Scheme is expected to rectify this. The tender for the scheme was awarded to Three Ireland, which previously said the scheme should be rolled out by the third quarter of next year.

The OECD includes households with DSL, cable, fibre, and wireless connections with speeds faster than 256 kbit/s to end users, but does not take into account mobile broadband users.

DSL connections are the most common in Ireland, the study found, with few fibre/LAN customers and only a small number of wireless subscribers in comparison.

In the wider 30-country OECD region, DSL remains the most popular technology, with 60 per cent of connections. This is followed by cable at 29 per cent, and fibre and local area networks with 9 per cent.

Average prices for broadband access in Ireland remain among the highest in the OECD area, while advertised speeds were among the slowest at the time the survey was carried out, the report found.