ESB to create new fibre powered ISP

From the perspective of any citizen or business in Ireland, I think this is actually a very positive move as it will mean that there might be some hope of bypassing the telecommunications bottleneck that eircom's access networks have become over the last decade or so.

I hope the Government sees it as a major opportunity to get some serious fibre to premises rollout!

I've researched this over the years and just have a good bit of general knowledge of the area but the history of telecommunications in Ireland has been far from a rosy one from a public policy point of view. It's actually been a history of the network crumbling, then a crisis causing state investment, followed by the network returning to a crumbling situation again.

1920s - Ireland's telecommunications infrastructure splits off from the UK GPO and the Irish Post Office (GPO) / Department of Posts and Telegraphs (P&T) takes over. Things are run pretty much as was and the network, while not wonderful, was reasonable for that era.

1930s - Some automation had been rolled out by then with dial service in Dublin, Cork etc. However, progress was very slow and a trade war with the UK (1932-1938) made it difficult for the Irish P&T to buy British equipment. That, and the general lack of investment / lack of funds sees the network stagnate and become quite poor.

WWII - Reasonable excuse for slippage. Not much could be done there.

1950s - 1980:
P&T Ran the worst excuse for a telephone network in Western Europe / developed world.
Minimal investment, ancient switches (other than a few Ericsson crossbars in selected urban areas), bad national connectivity (crackly, inaudible lines), bad / non existent international connectivity (still dependent on the UK GPO for most of it).
There had been a complete failure to rollout anything even approaching adequate automatic voice services and there were disastrously bad / non-existent data services.
By the early 1980s there were still Step-by-Step voice switches from the 1930s in service and operators plugging in cables into boards to connect calls. Something most countries had seen disappear in the 50's!

Customers were being expected to wait 2 years to get a line installed.

Many companies had to go without telephone service in many areas etc etc.

This can be partially explained because P&T was a Government Department, not a semi-state company, it also had endless political interference, and lacked proper corporate structures. It couldn't really do any of the things that a normal company would need to do e.g. manage its own finances and its employees were actual civil servants. TDs regularly got involved with really petty stuff like asking about constituents individual telephone line installations in the Dail!

Late 1970s - Early 1980s :

A national crisis situation developed (not dissimilar to the broadband situation now in some respects) where the state had to put telecommunications right or it was going to lose business / investment. Big pressure came on from Irish companies, IDA, and foreign companies who found the infrastructure ridiculously bad etc. The situation was just embarrassing and we were languishing at the bottom of all the international league tables.

1984: Restructure (Telecom Eireann was split from Post Office) and Government and European cash was lashed into new switching systems, microwave links, fibre etc.
There was a partnership with Alcatel (probably backed by French export loans and serious knowledge transfer with the French PTT) & an existing partnership with Ericsson was enhanced resulting in both companies deploying leading-edge tech in Ireland's network like some of earliest rollouts of digital switches anywhere in Europe. Ericsson and Alcatel also ended up spinning out quite a lot of IT jobs at the time in Ireland as part of the deal i.e. Alcatel in Bandon (Cork) (now gone) and Ericsson's sites at Athlone & Dun Laoghaire turned into R&D/Training facilities.

Mid-1980s - Starts to drastically improve into the 1990s ... Briefly leading edge. Results in a lot of companies locating customer contact, back office data processing for finance companies and other centres in Ireland.

Deal with struck with Motorola to setup Eircell TACS network (more knowledge transfer & spin off jobs via Motorola in Cork)

1990s - Internet age kicks off and EU opens up telecoms market, but Ireland, Greece and another few weirdly gets derogation on this. I'm not sure why as it made little sense in Ireland's case.

Telecoms market eventually opens in Ireland just before privatisation.

1999 - Privatised ... Briefly goes according to plan and ticks away as a PLC.

2000s - Vulture capitalists buy it out and take it fully private - Almost no investment and asset stripping ... Innovation stops almost entirely and the company rapidly becomes technological laggard again, this time with vast debt burden run up by leveraged take-over deals.

2010s - Failure to invest and innovate begins to see serious loss of market share as their main competitors (UPC in particular) are now 10+ years ahead of them, debts become unsustainable & the company goes into receivership.

Is this really the kind of organisation that we'd want to be dependent upon for our core telecommunication networks ?!?

To me they look like they've been a disaster for decades. I'm pretty sure the Government's probably looking at every way of bypassing them entirely!

We're back at a similar crossroads to the mess in late 1970s when P&T was a drag on the economy. Only this time it's a private company.

This ESB project might FINALLY lead to a proper neutral fibre access network that could see real broadband products being rolled out that actually put us back at the cutting edge again!

Is this not really about ducting? ESB into houses for the last number of years has been by duct not direct buried or overhead line (in the cities / suburbs). Reasonable easy and cheapish to pull a fibre into a house through an existing duct. Fibre plus equipment should be less than 500 at a guess and at current 30/month that should be recovered pretty easily.

Now what am i missing?