why oh why are we known as the "e-hub of europe"

Tellox

yesterday, I asked asked this by somebody on ICQ.
I replied "lol we're not".. to this he said "do you have high speed connection?" "nope, we dont even have a flat rate internet" I replied. Then I put up with about 5mins of slagging about ireland before I told him to cram it up his arse and put him on the ignore list.

Can somebody please tell me why the government claim we're the e-hub of europe? For a country our size, Its very possible to become the e-hub of europe, but thanks to a certain internet tycoon's money hungry plans, that wont be happening until they're forced to by the government.

Boston

for our size we have alot of international capacity, something like 20% of all european bandwidth passes through here.

the problem is we have this ability but were not using.

the same can be said about the backbones, have you any idea how many fibre rings there are around dublin. every one in dublin could be very easly sitting on vdsl conenctions(bit of hyperbole there)

yellum

Why not use these phrases for Ireland and do something like the latest trend of Google Bombing ? Get all members to put a link to irelandoffline.org/ehub.html with the link text of "E-Hub of Europe" then when someone searches google for that phrase the top results will be an IrelandOffline page explaining that this simply is not true and what the real situation with Irish telcos is.

glimmerman

I'm a recent immigrant, and was interviewed by the Irish Times along with several others as to our thoughts on Ireland, and Dublin in particular. I couldn't resist having a go at the broadband status, hope they print it! I particularly had a good laugh at the idea of the ehub centre of Europe. I'm from Cape Town, SA, which is not exactly an ecommerce hub (well, maybe it is of Africa, which is not exactly a thriving ecommerce of anything), and back there its pretty much the same situation. You can get ISDN to your house, but it costs a bomb. DSL doesn't even seem to be twinkle in the eye of Telkom (our local monopoly ripoff company).

Look out for it in the IT on Saturday

davros

Originally posted by glimmerman
I'm a recent immigrant, and was interviewed by the Irish Times along with several others as to our thoughts on Ireland, and Dublin in particular. I couldn't resist having a go at the broadband status, hope they print it!

Just read this. Nicely-barbed comments on broadband!

IMO, it stings even more for an 'outsider' (I use the word in the nicest possible way) to criticise our shortcomings, whether that be broadband, litter, friendliness or whatever. Lots of people will read this article who wouldn't dream of reading a technical piece from the business pages. That would include politicians, I'm sure.

I notice that M. Chambraud in the same article makes a more general but related point. He says people here are too complacent, that we get very little in return for the 42% of our income that goes on tax.

Anyway, thanks Glimmerman.

SkepticOne

glimmerman's interview is in the Saturday IT Magazine article "Dublin can be heaven..."

extract:The Celtic Tiger seems to me to have been about the right mix of people. There are lots more opportunities here, and because of the close links with the US, Ireland is very well positioned to prosper. On the downside, broadband access here is dreadful. I can't believe Eircom is selling it as ISDN. We're still waiting in suspense for DSL to arrive in Dublin. It's very difficult to justify the e-commerce hub image without broadband.