Where Now For IrelandOffline ?

DonegalMan

We’re due the next IrelandOffline AGM within the next couple of months and this usually leads to some navel gazing in the weeks leading up to it, so I thought I’d kick it off now to allow adequate time for debate

IOFFL has now been in existence for 5 years and IMO the environment has changed radically in the last couple of years. It’s a bit hard to believe now that when we first set up, the focus was nearly all about Dialup and getting decent FRIACO packages, Broadband was little more than an aspiration.

Now we have Broadband available to about 60% of the population and a range of half decent packages available. For those unfortunately still stuck with Dialup, the frustration is more with Dialup’s total unsuitability for modern Internet usage more so than the cost of it; that is not meant in anyway to underestimate the despair and anger among many users about costs and the way they are ripped off for a vastly inferior product but what they really want is Broadband, not cheaper Dialup.

The present situation is still abysmal where up to 40% of the population can’t get Broadband at all and Ireland, despite all the promises of moving us up in international comparison tables, has made no progress at all and is arguably slipping further behind.

Where I see the big change is in the public recognition of the issues, largely due to the efforts of IOFFL who seemed to be ‘ploughing a lonely furrow’ on these for a long time. Now the media, Comreg, the Government, the Telco’s and the public at large are aware of how bad Ireland’s performance really is and the potential impact on our economy. Forget the spin that people like Comreg and the Government try to put on it, they know damned well how bad things are, they are only trying to do a bit of face-saving whilst they scratch their heads trying to figure out what to do about it.

I’m wondering what impact this should have on the role and approach of IrelandOffline over the next couple of years. To me, the ‘big battles’ have been fought and now it’s more a war of attrition requiring a very professional and polished approach from IrelandOffline; a good example of this is Damien Mulley’s recent interview on 5/7 live where Comreg made total idiots of themselves by refusing on air to engage with IrelandOffline and Damien then took their report apart in a very cool but very professional manner.

Another important factor is that we are moving into a general election year and this provides great opportunities for putting Broadband even more firmly on the political agenda - again, this will require a very polished and professional approach.

Past practice for driving IrelandOffline forward has been to have an AGM where, on a good day, you get 40 of our 1800 members attending, people volunteer for service and get elected. It’s the ‘luck of the draw’ what calibre of committee you end up with and I think that we have been very, very lucky with the committees we have had so far and that each of them has had at least a couple of members who have been both capable of and willing to take on the onerous workload that goes with keeping IrelandOffline in it’s prime position for representing telecoms consumers.

It strikes me that over the last 5 years we have seen some really good talent in IrelandOffline, we need to capitalise on that talent for the next couple of years to achieve our long term ambition of IrelandOffline working itself out of a job. I think we should be able to find a better way of marshalling that talent than depending on the randomness of an AGM.

Any ideas, anyone ?

watty

I'd rate Broadband really available to 48% but maybe I'm pessimistic.

There STILL is a need for FRAICO and it absurd it doesn't exist.

Number porting, LLU and the Luddite/Nimby attidute of Public to masts (there is no health hazard), Eircom backhaul charges etc.

Sponge Bob

watty wrote:

I'd rate Broadband really available to 48% but maybe I'm pessimistic.

I will say 60-65% population coverage now from proper networks. VSAT is not a proper network. Many poor even third world countries can do that well.

There STILL is a need for FRAICO and it absurd it doesn't exist.

absolutely, it should be way cheaper for those who cannot get DSL. That would encourage eircom to upgrade lines. Say €9.99 a month unlimited.

Blaster99

I think the way Ireland Offline operates is nearly optimal considering the situation and I don't think I would change much. The organisation has excellent media contacts that are used efficiently to get the message across with the least amount of effort. I think IOFFL should continue to work more or less exactly the way it is. Given the significantly improved broadband situation (while still dire), there's not going to be masses of volunteers who're going to put in a lot of work.

lucernarian

You three that have just posted, will you attend an AGM?? I will if there is one, and it does not interfere with work.

Are AGMs beneficial, except at making a dent in the committee members pockets?

dahamsta

I'll be there this year, unless something major conflicts with it.

IMO they are beneficial, the people involved need to network in person occasionally, and members often have ideas that are better expressed in that format.

adam

netwhizkid

I might also attend if I knew when and where it was on etc.

jwt

Not being a smart arse here but given previous years, people posting here saying they'll attend means not a lot on the day.

Not implying that people are lying or making things up, but as the day approaches other things come up, etc etc It just the way things are.

Still waiting for someone to comment on martins thoughts, and in particular

I think we should be able to find a better way of marshalling that talent than depending on the randomness of an AGM

John

dahamsta

I sent my thoughts to Martin and Damien privately.

rkeane

"Professional suave speakers with Enda and Pat on side and get air time and compare the failings and it won't be long until something is done.”

Give me a break - those 2 guys are absolute idiots. Enda Kenny has the charisma of a plank of wood. Don't 4get, he comes from a party that wants to pay kids to go to school - dam fools. Pat Rabitte on the other hand can't even figure out how he's going to make us all richer without increasing taxes. Labour and FG will spell an economic disaster for this country.

It is true though - Comreg have been a joke. They never stood up to Eircom - now we are playing catch up in the broadband field. It is encouraging to see Magnet and other companies offering good value products to consumers.

cgarvey

Yellow cards for rkeane & netwhizkid. Your political rants don't belong in this forum.

.cg

netwhizkid

cgarvey wrote:

Yellow cards for rkeane & netwhizkid. Your political rants don't belong in this forum.

.cg

Mine is now erased.

leoc

I think Ireland Offline should keep a stong focus on dialup charges. The situation has improved significantly, but it's still awful compared to prices in the UK, in the US, or indeed in this country before 1994.

Genuine unmetered rates would make ISDN a lot more endurable for those who still can't get broadband. At present, if you go online using both ISDN channels to get a 128k connection you'll burn through your

eircom.net Flatrate Anytime allowance in 75 hours, about 2 1/2 hours a day. Even 5 hours a day is painfully little time if you use the Internet for work or like to hang out on IM and MMORPGs.
[*]Of course, most of that dialup loot goes straight to Eircom. The less money they make ripping people off with Hispeed, the more likely they are to decide that maybe they could afford to ADSL-enable a few more exchanges, after all.
[*]Comreg and Eircom are easy to catch out on this issue; most of their excuses for their other failings don't apply. They can't hide behind the terrible burden of ribbon development or the twin mysteries of highly-sensitive broadband technology and inexplicably low consumer demand.

leoc

Ireland Offline's recent showing in the media has certainly been impressive. However I am slightly worried that a few of the figures the organisation has published recently may not have been precisely accurate. Imperfect figures could endanger IOFFL's valuable credibility. IOFFL should work hard to be, and be seen to be, an accurate source of information.

leoc

I'm looking forward to the launch of the Wiki. I think it could prove very successful at drumming up high-quality research and drawing it together. Imagine if we could get the quality of the Wiki up to the point where journalists and politicians turn to it for information about being a telecoms consumer in Ireland. It would also make it easy to create high quality memos and press packs based on the Wiki information.

Bonus points if we can get the Wiki to automatically create an entry for every item that appears in Comreg's RSS feed.

leoc

DonegalMan wrote:

Forget the spin that people like Comreg and the Government try to put on it, they know damned well how bad things are, they are only trying to do a bit of face-saving whilst they scratch their heads trying to figure out what to do about it.

True. But I think that the Government knows exactly what needs to happen, it just hasn't done it yet.

First, Comreg has to be given all the legal powers it needs to gut Eircom like a fish at almost the first sign of disobedience. There's a bill due - when again? - before the end of this Dail, maybe?

Second, Eircom does of course have a price - for a large enough ransom they will go quietly rather than drag things all the way through the courts. The Government should probably be willing to stump up if the price is right. This isn't incompatible with point 1, quite the contrary: the surer Eircom is that they will lose badly in court, the more reasonable their Danegeld will be. Of course, any agreement with Eircom will have to be watertight, with easily enforceable penalties for non-compliance, or they're likely to just pocket the money and come back for more.

Third, the Minister may have to, ah, make some new appointments at Comreg. To be fair, if it really is the case that Comreg don't have the legal clout to safely bring Eircom to heel, then quite possibly no-one could have done much better at controlling it. But if the new legislation comes in and Comreg doesn't start bringing the pain to Eircom fairly efficiently, then it will be time for new people.

clohamon

Eircom has been the most rational and predictable element in this scenario. They have acted dependably and competently in the interests of shareholders at all times. They will continue to delay and frustrate attempts at regulation in the courts. A new act simply creates a new area of untested law for Eircom's highly effective lawyers to exploit.

If you want a quality universal service; then the state must buy back the infrastructure. Get the brains trust in IOFFL to work out a fair value. Get the number out in the media and at least then there is something to discuss.

oscarBravo

leoc wrote:

...Eircom does of course have a price - for a large enough ransom they will go quietly rather than drag things all the way through the courts. The Government should probably be willing to stump up if the price is right.

I've made my position on this quite clear in the past, and I made it in person to a senior advisor to the Minister this week.

In response to Eircom's fcuk-you attitude to much of the country, several broadband providers have invested a lot of time and money in trying to fill in the gaps. The GBS was one initiative to facilitate this process, but it would have happened anyway.

Eircom have done everything in their power to block this process, from frigging up Smart Telecom's LLU process, to enabling mickey-mouse exchanges just because group schemes were about to go live. And now we're talking about letting the government reward them for this, by financing their monopoly position?

I can live without the government throwing money at my company or the other Eircom competitors out there. What I'd find very, very hard to live with is the government financing Eircom's efforts to nip competition in the bud and further entrench their monopoly.

leoc

clohamon wrote:

If you want a quality universal service; then the state must buy back the infrastructure.

You would have exactly the same problems trying to renationalise Eircom (or bits of it) that you have in trying to regulate it properly. Any kind of compulsory purchase attempt would certainly lead to an enormous round of litigation. Alternatively, the current owners of Eircom will be happy to sell it voluntarily, at the 'right price'.

And then, of course, you'd have to run the infrastructure you'd just bought back. Given this State's record at building roads, running hospitals and for that matter regulating Eircom, I don't want to imagine the job it would make of running the thing. Actually, I don't have to imagine, I can remember: I can remember Telecom Eireann introducing the local call ripoff, in 1994!

And for political reasons it simply isn't gonna happen. Imagine the political embarrasment of being the only government in Europe which is renationalising its telecoms infrastructure? It's dicey enough hoping that the Government will finally discover the motivation to just fix the regulatory system.

clohamon wrote:

If you want a quality universal service; then the state must buy back the infrastructure.

Simply untrue. The UK and some other EU countries enjoy a quality universal service provided by private telephone companies who are being effectively regulated.

damien

Anyone care to read the original post that Martin posted? So far it seems Blaster99 was the only one to answer, everyone else seems to have decided to post their wishlist of what they want IrelandOffline to do for them.

These are the facts:
AGMs are poorly attended.

For someone like myself who puts in 2-3 hours almost every day into IrelandOffline, who has given up holidays and who has spent thousands of euros of my own money on keeping IrelandOffline moving along, seeing 25 people turning up at an AGM is very disappointing. Listening to 25 people telling me what "we" should be doing but then only 5 people volunteer to join the committee is even more disappointing.

Even those who come on board the committee don't have time to put in any work due to commitments so it is the usual thing where 20% of the people do 80% of the work.

We had a list of things that we wanted to achieve after the last AGM such as:

• Setting up a bank account and a proper constitution. Those who were appointed to do it didn't do it.
• We were going to reexamine FRIACO and work on a campaign for it. Didn't happen.
• We were going to launch Broadbandforall.ie, still hasn't happened.
• A campaign to educate every politician and let them know of the real facts about broadband and to encourage the public to complain to their political representatives. Didn't happen.
• We set up a volunteers list and there's 40 people on it. I think 5 people have at most done work we asked.
• We have a wiki that died a death because people wouldn't work on it.
  

What we have achieved though is:

• Highlighted to more and more people that we have a regulator that damages the telecoms market and needs to be removed/rebooted/replaced.
• We have a Minister who is constantly badgered on air about broadband and appears to be under a lot of pressure. so much so that he starts mudslinging and saying we are damaging our economy.
• We have every telecom company (including eircom) keeping in regular contact with us and a lot of the time consulting with us before new product launches.
• We are known by a great deal of politicians.
• We have a stronger and friendlier media profile than most other players in the telco environment.
• We have a regulator so scared of us now that they make idiots of themselves on radio by refusing to come on air or else refuse on ait to engage with us. Or as has happened recently, they have demanded that papers not print our press releases. Harassing the press rarely works guys. Get some media lessons.
• We have seen an incumbent who are also feeling the pressure from all sides and who are relaxing line tests and going to some exchanges they might never have gone to.

The momentum could be sustained and the unfulfilled wishlist could be completed if more resources are available. By resources I mean people willing to do more than post on a forum about what should be done. We already have an over-abundance of that.

Blaster99's suggestion is one way of doing it. Keep IrelandOffline the way it is going. But that means myself and JWT doing almost all the work. I won't be in that IrelandOffline though and I think others on the current committee feel the same way.


For the rest of the thread I'm asking people to suggest how IrelandOffline goes forward not in policy but in structure. What is the best structure for IrelandOffline to have after the next AGM and how do we get more people to work with us? This includes all the people who post on the forum but do no more than that. If anyone decides to have a debate about something else other than the future of IOFFL then create a new thread.

Blaster99

I would like to clarify my suggestion slightly.

IOFFL as it stands makes use of reports from ComReg, EU, OECD, and even eircom and does snappy press releases based on these and gets a lot of media attention. I think it's a very effective and clever way to operate and it works really well. The beauty with this is that all these reports invariably make IOFFL's point and they're independent or from trust-worthy sources (yeah alright, some of the sources are less trust-worthy than others but let's be nice for a moment) which make them handy for media. IOFFL has also very successfully established itself as the independent voice on broadband which means IOFFL is called into every radio debate on the topic and I'm sure gets phone calls from journalists all the time looking for angles.

Yes, IOFFL could be more. IOFFL could have a Wiki, IOFFL could do more to help the little guy against the powers that be, IOFFL could lobby politicians more directly, IOFFL could even have a price comparison if I got my act together. But the reality is most likely that there are not the volunteers around to achieve this and I would even speculate that we wouldn't get the same bang for buck for this effort in comparison to the current focused output.

In summary, I would suggest keeping the workload and objectives the same but try to spread the load as much as possible. I know this sounds like work, but I would suggest that jwt and Damien try to identify ways of doing this.

leoc

DonegalMan wrote:

I’m wondering what impact this should have on the role and approach of IrelandOffline over the next couple of years.

The OP asked how IOFFL could get more useful work out of its members, and I responded to that. It also asked a few other (related) questions, and I responded to them, too.

It also expressed some opinions about the current telecoms situation in the country (the government's position, etc.) and I stuck my oar in about that as well. That led things to go a bit off-topic, for which I apologise.

damien.m wrote:

What is the best structure for IrelandOffline to have after the next AGM and how do we get more people to work with us? This includes all the people who post on the forum but do no more than that.

I think that a wiki is the best way of getting people online to contribute research and writing. The users can contribute without having to commit themselves to do specific tasks in advance - though they still have to contribute, of course. It may not have taken off last time, but I think the best thing to do is just try again; I'm not aware of a better approach.

Speaking for myself, I am waiting to contribute serious work to an IOFFL wiki, just as soon as it is set up (again). (Heck, if no one else wants to set up the wiki software this time then I'll *wince* consider doing it myself.) I can't make many other commitments, mainly because I spend most of my time out of the country.

oscarBravo

damien.m wrote:

...I'm asking people to suggest how IrelandOffline goes forward not in policy but in structure. What is the best structure for IrelandOffline to have after the next AGM and how do we get more people to work with us? This includes all the people who post on the forum but do no more than that. If anyone decides to have a debate about something else other than the future of IOFFL then create a new thread.

Apologies for contributing to the off-topicness of the thread. I'll almost certainly attend the AGM, as I have for the past several years (I'll even promise not to hog this one). I think it's still inappropriate for me to rejoin the committee, but to be honest I'd subscribe to the philosophy that you never quit on a winning streak: Ireland Offline is making a difference, and a change of structure could really be counterproductive.

That said, I recognise Damien's points about a small number of people taking on a disproportionate amount of the work. Unfortunately, that tends to be the nature of voluntary organisations: you can't kick asses to make things happen.

On one hand it's encouraging that a number of people who already have broadband are active on the committee. On the other hand, maybe some of those who are most vocal about their broadband problems need to step up and shoulder some of the burden.

jwt

That said, I recognise Damien's points about a small number of people taking on a disproportionate amount of the work. Unfortunately, that tends to be the nature of voluntary organisations: you can't kick asses to make things happen.

Yep thats the nature of the beast alright, problem is that as Damien said

I won't be in that IrelandOffline though and I think others on the current committee feel the same way.

Does anyone (I realise some have pm'd or mailed already) have any ideas or notions on how IOFFL can go forward if the current situation is untenable. And it is untenable for the future. It only works and makes a success due to hard work. And the people who do the hard work are saying enough is enough.

From the first day I joined the committee I have been tempted but refrained from responding to posts saying “What you should do is……” or “You didn’t do that right” etc. and replying by saying “Well fine, you get off your backside and you see what you can do”

Well folks the time is nigh. You are being asked what way IOFFL can go forward. And it really is a case of speak now or forever hold your peace. Or to use a different expression, put up or shut up.

I take Blaster99's comment about timely responses to press releases as being effective.

I'll make a suggestion.

Why even bother having a committee, why bother with the AGM, after all it's going to be the same few, saying the same things to the same people. Scrap the AGM, scrap the committee, make Damien IOFFL.

We all get to sit back, put our feet up and point out his mistakes. And for a bit of variety have a whinge now and then that he's not doing enough, hasn't covered this or that, or hasn't donned his black ninja outfit and assasinated person x,y or z live on air.

It'll be great.


John


and yes Christian, if your reading this, the irony of all this is not lost on me

oscarBravo

jwt wrote:

and yes Christian, if your reading this, the irony of all this is not lost on me

Heh. Adam for interim chair. Again.

cgarvey

I think one point needs to be made here. Not withstanding the unacceptable situation of Damien doing all the work (and I believe JWT is up there on the work load as well), there needs to be some credit given to posters here who have raised very valid points the IoffL take forth. Not a whole lot of credit, but some.

As to what happens to the future IoffL, I'm still thinking over the merits of the suggestions being bandied about. I haven't a solution. Besides, I want to live up to my end of the bargain before I go spouting "the way it should be".

As to the point of the Wiki, I'm half way through sorting the spam vs. content. It's low priority as there was only 2 active users last time I checked. A wiki needs scores of people to be successful and current .. but at least a handful to get up and running. We didn't have that. Maybe we can get that again, but I'm sceptical.

jwt

cgarvey wrote:

.....there needs to be some credit given to posters here who have raised very valid points the IoffL take forth. Not a whole lot of credit, but some.

You're right, credit where it's due. And in particular those who contribute to the braintrust, PMs, analysis etc.

This forum acts as a collective (I won't say intelligence ) analysis/research/memory bank.

John

Paddy20

IrelandOffline has achieved enormous success for internet consumers, but as with most voluntary organisations, the average internet consumer has a short memory.

They will reap the benefits of IOFFL's achievement's, but do not expect any genuine gratitude or recogition from joe publis, business, the media or anyone else.

An enormous amount has been achieved that will eventually benefit Ireland both socially and economically given time, clearly more continuing pressure is required by IrelandOffline, but whether or not it will be appreciated is questionable ?..

P. :cool:

jwt

*bump*