Irish SMEs think ISDN is broadband

SkepticOne

From a survey by CIB/SFA and reported in the Sunday business post.

Has your company installed a broadband telephone line within the past year?

Yes: 69.4 per cent

No: 30.6 per cent

If so, what type of line?

ISDN: 80 per cent

Leased: 20 per cent

I suppose they could be talking about primary rate ISDN but this is unlikely. It also means a lack of understanding by CIB and SFA since they asked the question.

I suppose most people with "hi-speed" also think they have broadband.

R. Daneel Olivaw

Well utter ****ing ignorance is the key to business in Ireland, and has been for years (forgetting for a moment the way Ireland had railroads to just about everywhere in the country no matter how far out a tiny peninsula but these days Cork Dublin is a lucky day).

For some reason they believe (stupidly) that the world begins and ends with Eircom, a belief that Eircom no doubt love. I can't understand how these people believe that a narrowband 64k line is anything but a standard connection. But if all they know is what Eircom tell them, that's all they'll get.

And people wonder why Ireland is so vulnerable to tech industry collapses.....

Say this on HardOCP yesterday:
"."Kyle: Looks as if NVIDIA has the 21.83 DetonatorXP drivers posted. (Steve posted yesterday.) I am pulling them down at 25KB. Not lightning, but not too bad either. Then again, I still have my ISDN connection which will keep you appreciating that broadband all the time.

All I can really is that Eircom and their kind will feel the pain in 10 years if they are even still around, because the current people who want broadband (that's actual broadband, not ISDN/PSTN) will be the people managing companies in 10 years time.

SkepticOne

It is very sad that ISDN is considered "broadband" by SMEs and more importantly their representative body (and who should be educating businesses about technology) particularly when ISDN is pretty much a standard phone line nowadays in Germany.

It has often been said that Ireland is a third-world country when it comes to telecommunications but look at this quote from Slashdot:

I'm in Brazil. I've 2 DSL connections, one at home, another at the office. Both are provided by one of the local phone companies. Telefonica's DSL offer is called "Speedy" and comes in one of two flavors:

The "domestic" Speedy grants me a static IP address and is supposed to have the low ports (0-1024) blocked - but they aren't. It costs around US$ 45,00 /month in total. The one I have at home is 128 Kbps.

The "business" Speedy at the office gives me 5 static addresses (although not in the same net block) and is currently 256 Kbps. It costs around US$ 80,00 and is promised to never have any ports blocked.

gurramok

Has your company installed a broadband telephone line within the past year?
Has your company installed a broadband telephone line within the past year?

Yes: 69.4 per cent

No: 30.6 per cent

If so, what type of line?

ISDN: 80 per cent

Leased: 20 per cent

Mayb the SME's will wake up when they see the international stats, the real stat that says only .01%(prob more zeros) penetration for broadband.
Their ignorance is costing 'em a fortune.
Mayb they need a few leaflets dropped thru their letterbox informing 'em what broadband actually is !

I suppose most people with "hi-speed" also think they have broadband.

NOT me hehe, its still plain old isdn to me

SkepticOne

Originally posted by gurramok
Mayb the SME's will wake up when they see the international stats, the real stat that says only .01%(prob more zeros) penetration for broadband.
Their ignorance is costing 'em a fortune.

That would not be a bad idea, IMHO. The other thing would be educating the SFA. You would think they would know better.

In fact the percentage of SMEs using actual broadband is 14% (20% of 70%). Of course it would be much higher if broadband was available that made use of existing infrastructure. The SFA got it totally arsewise. I didn't realise they were so rubbish.

Lemming

Since Eircom shows utter contempt to the home users, and obviously only take their business users seriously, wouldn't it make sense to actively educate the SME's as to the state of play in this country?

If Eircom started loosing large sums of money from businesses they'd sit up and take notice (in theory only - this IS Eircom we're talking about).

So rather than just being home users campaigning for broadband / flat-rate access, shouldn't we try to grab the attention of the business community as well, and use them as a VERY large 2x4 with nails to bash Eircom with?

d-j-k

Small enterprises get exactly the same bad deal as home users.
Over priced out-dated services. How many companies could do with seriously fast cheap connections for web servers, inter office WAN, various data links.

Companies are paying over the odds for 128kbps leased lines etc and having to put up with slow traffic between nodes in networks. Other companies are unable to afford to use web based purchacing systems as the access cost is so high it can't be justified. Same goes for EDI Electronic data interchange systems which could be used in small businesses much more effectivily if broadband was cheap..

Even something as simple as credit card terminals!

Think of it this way.. when you swipe your credit card often the terminal doesn't dial up at all to save costs if the transaction is small. In other countries it would more than likely have an always on connection of some sort so the transaction would be verified. In ireland that would be totally uneconomic so credit card fraud is much easier!

Who do we blame?
Eircom..? maybe not, they're just doing what they can get away with and don't really owe anyone a living. It's how PLCs work. If there were 2 equally sized companies providing the same service things would be different!

the ODTR? maybe.. but then again nobody gave her any teeth!

The current government? definitely, they're not doing enough to regulate the market. A market which definitely needs serious regulation as there is a former monopoly player involved.

The access networks should NOT be in the hands of the main telco. We should have sold two companies off.. one Eircom as a network operator and another one as the company which holds the local exchanges and doesn't provide any backbone services. It could have gone head - to - head with cable, MDS and wireless operators and we'd have had a very interesting access market. E.g. sky could have offered a service over their DSL system etc etc.. possibilities would have been endless..

But it's too late now probabally, so we're stuck with what we have..

PhilipMarlowe

Thats a valid point...
In work, (a retail outlet), our phone bills have doubled lately due to a re-configuration by the bank of their credit card terminals as a fraud prevention measure... Before we set a floor limit of £100 so the machines never dialed up for authorisation below that amount...
Now they are set to dial up much more frequently and a certain percentage of the time for random transactions (theoritacally could be as little as £0.50)... and for us it is not a local call... (kilkenny to dublin).....

rymus

Originally posted by R. Daneel Olivaw
the world begins and ends with Eircom

Youve discovered the new Eircom motto

well, either that or

"Use or service... you dont have a whole lot of choice either way"

Urban Weigl

My grandmother who lives in Germany has:

- Digital cable TV with hundreds of channels
- ISDN phone line

She could easily get 768kbps ADSL from AOL for around £15 punts a month, but she thinks that's far too expensive. Good thing she doesn't live here -- she'd probably have a heart attack or something.

strat

taken from that webby

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guess they are laughing it up also :rolleyes:

SkepticOne

What we can learn from this is that there is a widespread ignorance out there about the various communications technologies out there. It is a specialist subject, but nevertheless, real money is involved and one might have expected greater knowledge amongst the SMEs who are spending hundreds of pounds a month on phone bills.

More worrying is the fact that the questionaire treated ISDN as broadband. This was a survey commissioned by a representative group for SMEs, specifically concerned with communications and designed, presumably, by professionals. Respondents who might have known that ISDN is not broadband were forced to answer incorrectly. Then we get the hugely distorted figure of 70% of businesses using broadband when in fact the true figure is nearer to 14% using expensive leased lines. This then gets reported by the national press (OK, the SBPost) and everyone feels better about themselves and the ODTR gets to issue press releases about how competitive the Irish telecommunications market is. In reality, the SMEs should be outraged that they are spending hundreds of pounds for what is available for £50 in the UK.

Q_Ball

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Served by Esat Business

Actually I was walking past the abbey theatre about a week ago when I saw that there were road works in progress. There was a sign in front of them from "Broadband Services" i think it was called, providing a service to Esat Business. Had a phone number and everything.

Meant to call see if they had any info on a home user service

sceptre

Originally posted by Q_Ball
Actually I was walking past the abbey theatre about a week ago when I saw that there were road works in progress. There was a sign in front of them from "Broadband Services" i think it was called, providing a service to Esat Business. Had a phone number and everything.

Meant to call see if they had any info on a home user service

They're a company who lay cable or summat - nothing to do with Esat directly (as you did point out) - so they wouldn't be of any help. They used be Ashbourne Communications. Now they're a subsidiary of Broadband Services Inc., Denver, Colorado

Read http://www.catv.no/firmaer/broadbandservices.htm for further info (the first part of the page is in Norwegian, the remaining three-quarters is in English.

Aside though, read this from Chorus about what they said they would do with 21 million euros of structural finds last January (may be of interest to o_donnell_abu as they said they'd bring broadband to Buncrana, Letterkenny, Donegal Town, Sligo.

http://www.chorus.ie/press_releases.php3?prid=1