Hypocrite...?

Mr_Man

In a sidebar article in to-day's IT supplement entitled 'Cheap Broadband Please' the author points out that EsatBT, who have been harping on about Eircom's high wholesale rate, (and its impact on Ireland's economy) is having the same charge levelled against it in the UK by a new pressure group called the Broadband Industry Group.

This group commissioned a survey which found

• with cheap broadband productivity will rise by 2.5% by 2005, an achievement that without BB would require each British worker to work an extra hour.
• This productivity rise will boost the economy by £22bn
• Govt spending will be lower and exports higher with cheap BB

The final paragraph of the article is worth quoting in full:

That broadband sure is great stuff. Industry players can only agree, it seems, that all the incumbents everywhere should be forced to drop wholesale prices as soon as possible.


And so say all of us.......

M.

Urban Weigl

While I am of the same opinion as you, I think it has to be said that while the equivalent wholesale DSL wholesale offering in the UK costs ~11 euros in the UK, it is 27.00 euros here (both excluding VAT and Internet bandwidth, i.e. the ISP will have to supply their own Internet connection).

That is a big difference, so I would not quite accuse EsatBT of hypocrisy on this one yet. Unless of course they demanded that Eircom lowered its wholesale price to less than 10 euros for example. They did not do that.