Minutes from joint Oireachtas Committee on broadband

damien

Linked below are the minutes for the meeting of the joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications where they discuss their broadband report. They dragged in E-net, Smart Telecom, BT, eircom, ComReg and Noel Dempsey and subjected some of them to a very tough line of questioning.

The most interesting section for me is when Isolde Goggin, John Doherty and Mike Byrne are questioned. We have our regulator telling an Oireachtas Committee that our line failure rate is in line with the rest of Europe and that us and Northern Ireland are pretty much the same for line failure.

The document is about 90 pages long but worth reading. Word doc of minutes.

WizZard

damien.m wrote:

We have our regulator telling an Oireachtas Committee that our line failure rate is in line with the rest of Europe and that us and Northern Ireland are pretty much the same for line failure.

:eek::eek::eek:
And did they swallow that lie?

(Just going to read these minutes now)

Urban Weigl

There is no line test in Northern Ireland, at least not for basic ADSL. All lines pass when you order, and you get posted out a modem. In the unlikely event that it doesn't work, they send out an engineer to fix your line.

damien

I'm waiting for clarification from the DETI NI but I believe there is a line failure rate alright but the fact is that if the line actually fails then you are guaranteed an alternative for the same price.

Hacketry

I was at that Oireachtas joint committee meeting and it seemed to me that many of the TDs of all parties had a genuine interest in questioning the minister, regulator, and company executives about broadband and other issues.

However, the lack of knowledge of the of the intricacies of issues such as LLU was palpable. Eircom, BT, ComReg etc all had advisors and general flunkies to advise them, but the commitee members did not. The Committee chair treated Noel Dempsey like God, and some deputies were only using the commitee as a platform to proove to their constituents that they had bemoaned their local lack of broadband.

I have a horrible feeling that the broadband issue could set the tempo for many future technology-related issues which become political, and are never quite sorted out because our elected representitives do not ask the right questions because they do not understand the issue in question or the answers they are getting.

Foxwood

Hacketry wrote:

I have a horrible feeling that the broadband issue could set the tempo for many future technology-related issues which become political, and are never quite sorted out because our elected representitives do not ask the right questions because they do not understand the issue in question or the answers they are getting.

It happened with e-voting. It happens with anything that requires any sort of technical competence - it's perhaps most glaringly obvious in the utter failure of the Dáil to do anything useful about the infrastructural deficit in the country.