Rural Ireland and Restricted Electricity

bijou

Not sure if this is the right place to post this.... but read this in the Indo today.
Is someone having a laugh????

"THERE was a national outcry last night when a government minister warned that rural parts of Ireland would be restricted to using only enough electricity to power three lightbulbs and a kettle."

The rest is here:
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/ronan-price-in-the-hitech-age-this-service-is-vital-3097453.html

coylemj

It's not a news item, it's an opinion piece.

The first paragraph is an attention-grabber which has clearly worked in your case.

Read the rest of the article, in particular the third paragraph.

Snickers Man

Rural Ireland doesn't want broadband. Not unless somebody else pays for it. They have made this abundantly clear down through the years, even expressing this forcefully at the ballot box.

Remember the "Deflector candidates" of 1997? One of whom even got elected.

Since the 1970s (at least) many people on the eastern seaboard have paid extra to install cable access to their homes. This was originally called "piped televison" if you go back far enough, ie to the 1970s where the cable was connected to a large communal aerial so that they could receive high quality British TV signals. The hard slog of laying the "last mile" of cable infrastructure was all done back then. Because individuals were willing to pay for it.

This gradually evolved so that Eastern Ireland had cable TV access long before most of Britain did. And of course this same coax infrastructure could, with a modicum of upgrade, be adapted to carry broadband digital traffic. aka The Internet.

In rural areas where exchanges are less concentrated and the cost of providing cabled broadband to every farmhouse and hamlet was prohibitive there were alternatives proposed. Wireless microwave transmission was licensed and made available. But the Luddites out Wesht thought they shouldn't have to pay for this and so demanded that cheaper, if illegal, "Deflectors", which merely detected and amplified TV broadcast signals were the way to go.

These of course had nothing to do with broadband transmissions and were only applicable to analogue TV broadcasts.

And now in 2012, as we all know, such broadcasts will be switched off for ever.

And rural Ireland is whinging about the digital divide.

Predictable and predicted. Hard to have any sympathy.

And isn't that nice Mr Quinn making satellite broadband available to anybody who can see the sky? Why not just shell out for a subscription to his company?

Or would you just rather that somebody else pay it for you?