Well done to you all. Happy 2005

damien

2004 has been a fantastic year for IrelandOffline, coming from the brink of extinction in July to being a nationally respected consumer group by December with a whole lot of media coverage on TV, national and local radio and national and local papers. We've done a lot in no small part to the great contributions on this forum as well as direct communications with various people.

I could list those who were fantastic during the past 6 months but it'd be a like some oscar speech and I'd totally and accidently forget people so I'll just thank everyone. It's not just those that have worked their asses off and written so much on the subject like Muck and eircomtribunal that helped IrelandOffline. It's those that believe in IrelandOffline and believe that change is needed in the telecoms sector in this country. Even those that post but twice have and do make a useful contribution.

We have a few things planned for 2005 such as our Broadband For All project and we are also thinking of having a seminar like the one we had previously where we got the telecom companies, the regulator and the Minister all in one room.

To do all of this is very hard work. Some on the committee have been putting in 8 hours per day into this group, which is totally voluntary and can be quite thankless at times. (everyone go awww). If members and the contributors here want to see IrelandOffline sustain and increase it's momentum they are going to have to put in effort too or next July we may face the same situation again where the outgoing committee was jaded.

It's be a shame for everything to come tumbling down now at a time when we have the attention of the media, the Government, ComReg, eircom, EsatBT and all the other stakeholders.

I'm not looking for volunteers right now or a debate on how to work out a way to distribute the load, but I do want you all to keep this in the back of your heads until we do ask for help, which hopefully will be real soon now.

Happy 2005.

Damien Mulley.
Chairman of IrelandOffline

jwt

I think it only fair to say that Damien has put in a staggering amount of work to date. Hats of to Damien



Yes we are getting jaded that’s why things have been quiet over Christmas as people catch their breath, but it's going to ramp up in January.

Already we are committed to another session with the DCMNR on Jan 11th at the Johnstown House Hotel, another meeting with ComReg sometime in Jan/Feb Newsletters, interviews, FOI results, the aforementioned seminar, etc etc etc.

One area where people can easily help is to provide the skeleton of a press release in response to some press release from another organisation rather than just telling us we should respond.
It doesn't have to be word perfect/polished just a couple of bullet points that allows someone else to flesh it out.
Writing a press release from scratch on a blank piece of paper takes time.
Fleshing out and polishing a pre-existing piece is a lot quicker.
On occasion I have spent 6-8 hours writing a pr from scratch, revising it submitting it to the committee re writing etc.


To give people an idea of the level of work being done since JULY

1126 emails have been sent on the committee mailing list (and not just yes no answers either), I personally have racked up over 40 hours of mobile phone calls and one committee member has sent an average of 10 texts a day! Roughly 3000 miles of travelling between the committee members combined (work that one out as a mileage allowance), Countless hours of IRC meeting/chats plus god knows how many posts here on boards (which in fairness is a small fraction of the work load)

And each an everyone of us on the committee has asked at one time or another how the hell Damien keeps it up (don't be rude)

And this year coming is going to be better! So much better!

I think everyone on this forum should take a bow.

John

Slutmonkey57b

I think everyone on this forum should apologise for being lazy and ignorant.

eircomtribunal

jwt wrote:

one committee member has sent an average of 10 texts a day!

Just to put this into the average Irish context, as reported in ComReg's latest Quarterly Report:
There were 920 million SMS messages sent this quarter, an increase of almost 3% on the previous quarter. This equates to an average of 86 SMS messages per subscriber per month.

My best wishes to IOFFL for 2005.

Peter

eircomtribunal

Enn's broadband roundup for 2004 is worth a look.
http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9571568
From the long article: "I do think we saw something new this year," says Damien Mulley, the chairman of pressure group Ireland Offline, which itself had a tumultuous year and nearly disbanded during the summer. "This year, for the first time, a lot of people came out and admitted that we were not doing well enough. That alone was one of the biggest changes," he said, noting that the mainstream media, the government, ComReg and, to a lesser degree, Eircom, admitted that there is work to do."

P.