[PR] Bright Future ahead for the IrelandOffline Lobbying Group

damien

At it's AGM in July, IrelandOffline addressed the fundamental issue of whether there was any point in the organisation staying in existence. They embarked on a two month soul searching exercise which culminated in a special meeting in Dublin on Saturday.

At the meeting, there was an overwhelming view that IrelandOffline is now needed more than ever and in the intervening weeks had made significant discoveries that would rock the current comfortable views held by the media, political and regulatory organisations alike. Damien Mulley, the newly appointed Chairman explains:

"Whilst there has been an impression of significant progress in Broadband provision in Ireland, most of it is little more than papering over the cracks.

On Five to Seven on Friday, Dr Philip Nolan, Chief Executive of Eircom, proudly pointed out that 75,00 users are now subscribed to Broadband in Ireland. Five years down the road, the fact that less than 2% of the population are Broadband enabled is not something to boast about, in our opinion it is a national disgrace"

Mulley went on: "Over the last two months, we have carried out a detailed survey of over 1300 people the length and breadth of the country including small businesses, those who want to work from home but can't and ordinary home users. The detailed results of this survey will be published in the near future but I can tell you now that we have encountered endless horror stories and that there is a total air of desperation that pervades the country in regard to lack of Broadband availability. "

IrelandOffline has made available a selection of these "Horror Stories" and they can be downloaded in a document from their website - http://irelandOffline.org

"We have been warning for a long time about how far behind the rest of the world Ireland is, the reality is instead of catching up, we are actually falling further behind. Two years ago we were guaranteed the ability to get an internet connection on our phonelines. Today this guarantee is no longer available. Our membership at large has pleaded with us to stay in business to highlight the reality of the dire state of Internet access in Ireland. "

Over the next few weeks, IrelandOffline will be publishing the results of their survey, making the data available to independent third parties and putting forward detailed proposals on the areas that need to be tackled. Progress can be tracked on their website http://irelandoffline.org


The Broadband Horror Stories can be directly downloaded from here

Paddy20

Could not have put it better myself

Who is this Eircom crowd anyway, are they the people who ran away too London with the Irish people's hard earned money, and are now trying to rob our citizens again, by selling shares in a 'Sinking ship' ?....