We have a situation here: ComReg hides failure

eircomtribunal

Behind the "spectacular"(not!) LLU connection price reduction, ComReg have sneaked out their last 2004 Quarterly Report.

ComReg's wholesale regulatory failure jumps us in the eye:
Irish home Internet penetration, already one of the lowest in the EU, has not grown since 2003. It actually declined from 37% to 35%

This is very bad news for Ireland's broadband catch-up prospects – it's the devastating result of inadequate regulation.

ComReg has done its utmost to conceal the failure, by taking the figure out of the Market figures and Market Commentary documents. In the Trendwatch document they tried to hide it under a ridiculous headline.

Shame on them.

P.

spongebob

Many of these households simply cannot access the Internet as it is basically unusable at speeds under 28k . Were Comreg to do something useful about FIA we could see the numbers creeping up a bit. Nor is there any evidence that Comreg policy on FIA coupled with a larger line rental income stream has contributed to an improvement in the copper plant .

It would be most helpful at this point if the committee were to brief us on their analysis of the FOI docs ....even an analysis based on a skim through them... that they have had for over a month now. I know that there are quite a few pages in there lads but ye could have spread the load

M

dahamsta

This would be most embarassing for the Government on a european and global level were it to get out to the mainstream media...

adam

damien

Muck, which FOI docs ? We have the LLU docs, all 800 pages of them and we last week (not last month) got the FIA docs which came in a lovely folder and were full of blank pages as they contained "commercially sensitive material".

I'll be happy to photocopy or send on all the FOI docs we have received to date though if you want all 900+ pages of them you can pay for photocopying/postage.

The FIA docs appear to be more interesting but as I said are largely blank sheets with bits of email conversations thrown in. If you want I can photocopy these for you and send them on ? Same goes for anyone else that wants them.

I only briefly looked at the LLU docs and the only thing I found interesting was the way the initial drafts were polished by this consultant. Stephen is the former electricity regulator in the UK and recently enough called for BT to be split up.

I've love to be able to scan all the docs in quickly and we could have them in digital format and have them available to all on our website. If anyone has access to one of those fancy scanners than can be fed 30-40 pages at a time we could do this. If anyone wants to volunteer to do this or wants to loan me one of these I'd appreciate it. The public are entitled to see these documents afterall.

With my two whole days off this Christmas I'll sort through the FOI docs I have and catalog them and might put the list on a page on the website so others can request copies off us.

spongebob

Sorry D.

I woulda thought that they were divved up and PDF'd by now, good use of Volunteers and all that. I could scan a chunk over the christmas .

The FIA stuff should at least have a Comreg position paper which is not Commercial as such, I'd love to see that alone , assuming it exists or ever existed !

M

damien

I'll photocopy the FIA stuff tomorrow and post it to Muck HQ. (I bet lots of people want to know where that is.) Or gimme a buzz and I'll go through it over the phone.

EDIT:

Regarding volunteers, 14 out of the 2500 members have so far volunteered. I had hoped to have a list of 30+ before I sent out work for them to do. I don't even know how many of the 14 have scanners and ocr software. I'll send out a mailshot to them later, I'll also have it mentioned in our Christmas newsletter.

dahamsta

From: adam beecher
Sent: 23 December 2004 15:07
To: The Register
Subject: Irish home Internet penetration rate DECLINES!

Hi guys,

I hate dissing Ireland, but I love taking pot-shots at Gov.ie and the muppets they employ:

It probably isn't unprecedented, but it has to be pretty unusual when Internet penetration /declines/ in a country, especially a hip-and-with-it country like Ireland (I'm laughing inside). But yes, although our "regulator" ComReg tried to bury it in an unusual location in their Quarterly Report, and despite the fact that they tried to spin it as "almost half of .. households online", there it is in orange and green (sorry):

Home penetration has dropped by 2%, from 37% to 35%.

See page 19:
http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/ComReg04121c.pdf

Here's the rest of the Quarterly Spin:
http://www.comreg.ie/whats_new/default.asp?ctype=5&nid=101906

It's a pity our third Commissioner position has just been filled, your buddy Alistair Campbell would feel right at home over here in ComReg. And the money's pretty good too!

Happy Christmas to ye!

adam

.

Urban Weigl

Home penetration has dropped by 2%, from 37% to 35%.

Should that not say it dropped by 2 percentage points (or something like that), since it fell by more than 2%?

Chalk

if no one has a fancy auto scanner and you want to share out the scanning ive got a few days off over christmas , i could scan a hundred or so in for you and forward them on.

the pc will be on and ill be doing nothing with it till i get my internet access ,
may as well do something.

damien

Ok, I'll ask one of the mods to split this thread to keep it on topic.

dahamsta

Urban Weigl wrote:

Should that not say it dropped by 2 percentage points (or something like that), since it fell by more than 2%?

Yeah, but the email is gone now and they're clever chappies in The Reg, they'll figure it out.

adam

spongebob

Oh NO! Adam

NOT the Reg , everybody reads (and fears) the Reg !

M

SkepticOne

Home penetration has dropped by 2%, from 37% to 35%.

Should that not say it dropped by 2 percentage points (or something like that), since it fell by more than 2%?

It is actually a drop of 5.5%.

The great danger here is that this, without proper analysis, will be interpreted as lack of demand requiring consumer education in the use of PCs and the internet and so forth, whereas the most likely explanation is that people, who wern't ever great users of the internet due to the history of high prices and poor service, are now getting rid of their phone lines or not renewing them when they move due to the line rental hikes.

eircomtribunal

Just to point out another botched figure undermining the reliability of the data in the ComReg doc:

We've 1 364 100 households in the country. 35% have home Internet connections, that is 477 435 households. According to this table 9% connect by means of cable modem to the Internet. That would mean we'd 42 969 residential cable Internet users, when we have only several thousands!

P.

spongebob

Yo!

It could also mean that the survey sample was Heavily skewed towards Dublin which has cable and with an inappropriate weighting for Galway , Cork , Limerick and Waterford which don't ....never mind Ballydehob or Ballinea.

Either way it is a crap statistical analysis.

M

damien

Muck wrote:

The FIA stuff should at least have a Comreg position paper which is not Commercial as such, I'd love to see that alone , assuming it exists or ever existed !

Checked all the FIA stuff again, can't find a position paper. They do mention something like this though, but it was not in the released documents. It does seem that they were not happy with eircom's idea of functional internet access but it appears that they will not be defining it using a minimum bit rate.

d-j-k

Why can't we get EXACT internet subscription numbers rather than ridiculously weak stats based on survey?

Can't comreg sign a confidentiality agreement with the various major ISPs and request accurate numbers to prepare an accurate real analysis of how many people are using which kind of service without revealing which provider they're with (if they're concerned about commercial stuff)

a 2% change in that survey's meaningless