For those who are being driven demented in their quest for a broadband connection, I have a simple solution. All you have to do is write a column for a national newspaper, writes Fintan O'Toole
A month ago, I wrote about the issue here, challenging from my own experience the consistently upbeat messages from Eircom and the Department of Communications. By 10 a.m. on the morning my column appeared, Eircom were on the phone and by 1 p.m. my broadband connection was up and running. It's a fantastic service, and a bit of publicity is all you need to get access to it. A few words here and all the technical problems disappear. All the months of screaming into a void, all the torment of unreturned phone calls, broken appointments and hollow cackling at the ads urging you to get broadband will be over. It's well worth the admittedly large fee I shall be charging to rent out this space.
We now have a new Minister for Communications in Noel Dempsey and an opportunity to revisit one of the Government's great public policy disasters. It has been recognised since the late 1990s that broadband access is a vital national interest for a State that claims to be in the forefront of the technological revolution. In its Statement of Strategy 2003-2005, the Department set itself as a "performance indicator" the aim to "have a fully competitive communications sector in place by the year 2005 which is on a competitive par with the key comparator OECD economies in terms of network penetration, investment, price, choice and quality, across all platforms".
The Government's stated goal is that Ireland's broadband connectivity be "among the top decile [i.e. the top 10 per cent] of OECD countries by 2005" and to "be the first European country to have widespread 5 Mbps Internet available". With the privatisation of Eircom, this has turned out to be pious nonsense and, for all the bluster from the outgoing minister, Dermot Ahern, over the last few months, he tacitly accepted that this is so.
Last March, in a policy directive to ComReg, he quietly downgraded the goal from being the best in Europe and among the top 10 per cent in the world to merely "be at or better than the EU-15 average for end-user access to and usage of broadband by mid-2005". It is now patently obvious not merely that the Government has abandoned its own "performance indicator" but that even this new goal of mid-table mediocrity will not be attained. Both the Government and Eircom have trumpeted their claim that 100,000 customers will be connected to broadband by the end of this year. The analyst Peter Weigl has estimated that even to meet the goal of mediocrity, the figure would have to be around 320,000 by next June.
The reason for this catastrophic failure is obvious enough to anyone not blinded by free-market ideology. The theory was that by flogging off Eircom and opening up the market, competitive forces would be unleashed which would result in profit-driven firms cutting each other's throats to service the customer. The problem with applying this faith-based approach to basic social and economic infrastructure, however, is that the infrastructure requires the kind of long-term investment that doesn't make sense to a private company like Eircom whose goals are to pay back the money its investors borrowed to buy it, to pay huge fees to its directors, and to generate immediate profits for its shareholders.
In his last days in office, Dermot Ahern muttered, in the midst of another upbeat speech about the wonders of broadband, the blatantly obvious truth that "there is no doubt the rollout of broadband to the regions has been hampered by a lack of investment in the necessary infrastructure by the private sector".
Except this isn't just a regional problem. The real issue is that so many of our phone lines are rubbish. The lobby group Ireland Offline and the Internet technology magazine siliconrepublic.com claim that less than half the 1.7 million lines in the Republic are capable of carrying a digital subscriber line (DSL) which is needed for broadband. While the official claim is that 70 per cent of the country is now broadband-enabled, the reality is that huge numbers of people in areas where broadband is technically available can't get it because their phone lines are not good enough. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when these lines were installed, they were often split, a practice that made sense at the time but that now leaves us trying to run a Formula One car on a bumpy boreen.
These lines need to be fixed, but Eircom, as a private company, has no incentive to do so. It needs to be forced to make the long-term investment. And this is where Noel Dempsey comes in. The stupidity of Government policy has been that, even when Eircom was flogged off, the other side of competition theory was not put in place. At the very least, private suppliers of essential services need to be heavily regulated to make sure they serve the public interest. Instead, ComReg was explicitly established with instructions that "the regulatory burden on the sector be minimised" and that its operations should be "light-handed".
Given the spectacular failure of this approach, might not a touch of heavy-handedness be in order?