On hiatus for retooling?

seamus

It seems there was talk there a few weeks ago, about stepping back, taking a month or so break, and restarting the campaign with renewed vigour. I agreed it was a good idea, but has it happened?

Mail and updates have been slow this month. Has it just happened unofficially or did I miss something? Or is everyone just on holidays etc etc?

I'm just curious. I certainly think that taking a month out, watching how the situation develops for that month, and then gathering all our data to create a bigger push then ever, is a good idea.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by seamus
It seems there was talk there a few weeks ago, about stepping back, taking a month or so break, and restarting the campaign with renewed vigour. I agreed it was a good idea, but has it happened?

That was the plan . In fact, there's been about seven meetings with politicos and company execs since the AGM. Another one with a ministerial advisor is happening later on today.

Where possible, we try to make these 'on the record' so that we can report to the wider membership but the more recent meetings have been private at the wishes of the parties concerned. This sometimes suits our purposes too as we can get across messages that we might not want others to hear.

Unfortunately, this may lead to a lack of visibility that we will have to address.

Currently we are working on ways to get industry support for our campaign. There are a lot of companies out there that might benefit from cheaper and more widespread broadband and flat-rate 56k. Support from companies will add weight to our message and help with lobbying.

The survey is now complete and is being circulated. MDR, who designed it, is now on the committee. He is currently working on a comparison of services in Norway vs. those in Ireland.

One thing I've noticed is that people have stopped posting campaign suggestions on this forum. That is a shame. Previous suggestions that we've acted on have been the residential survey, the EU trip, the comms bill letter campaign. All have been hugely successful and have opened doors to us.

As I've mentioned above, there's a new committee and we'll be announcing the list of committee members in the first week of September. I hope people can see that there's a fair amount of activity going on even though we haven't been saying much. We expect things to get more 'vocal' as the committee settles in over the coming weeks.

crawler

Good point raised - I also believe that a bit more creative thinking is needed, not to say that thinking to date has not been creative. What I really am trying to say is that awareness will generate interest which will in turn generate demand etc etc.

Making business groups aware of the real issues , for example Home-working , online shopping , debate , information sharing etc etc...you could go on all night!

Not to mention the increased demand for PC's , software etc etc....Yawn , Yawn.

This is something that can be fixed and frankly needs to be fixed not just for our personal reasons but also for the economy in general , Some good news for the TMT sector would be welcomed and if the Government recognised this instead of making fluffy remarks like "xDSL is available in Ireland" and "LLU" is now underway.......well Mr Bertie , so are trips to the Moon but you have to seriously pay through the teeth for those too!

MarkR

The colleges are back soon. I think i mentioned this before, but how about getting some of the student unions involved. Students will protest for anything! (I know i did!) The Grant is too small, beer too pricey, my room smells, that hill is too steep...

Seriously though, there has been a massive drop in the number of CAO applicants going for IT related courses this year. Ehub of europe and our IT sector is going downhill fast, aided and abetted by a lack of support for ebusiness. I wonder who eircom think are going to pay their bills when we've all emigrated to somewhere with decent setup. Like Iraq. (Was that one of the places who were doing better? I think it was. Russia too)

Anyway, get those third level students involved. They use the net everyday, have loads of free time, and are broke!

Mark

seamus

Originally posted by Legbreaker
Anyway, get those third level students involved. They use the net everyday, have loads of free time, and are broke!

Mark

You see, students are a fickle bunch. I should know, I'm one of them. Many students don't really care about issues unless it affects them directly.

On talking to students, and attempting to get some involved, there's always two excuses:

"I get really fast, free internet in college, I don't need it at home."

"My parents pay the phone bill, so I don't care."

There is only a small minority of college students who have a landline phone, and use it for internet and must pay the bill. That said, it's worth trying to get them involved, but I reckon certain faculties would need to be targeted. Arts students probably wouldn't give a ****, for the reasons above. We'd need to target students who need the net at home, namely Business and Computers students..........

dahamsta

Is there any merit in playing the fear card: You may have bandwidth now, little boy, but when you get out of college you're getting jack. 40k if you're lucky. And man oh man will you pay for it.

adam

timod

Last year, when I was a student, around the time of the blackout, I sent an email to my class, urging them to get involved, etc.... Got no feedback at all.

So, yeah, I believe only a limited set of students will be interested, i.e. those that pay out of their *own* pockets for their net access.

But by all means, promote the cause...

Kenshin

Maybe you can get some of the college Computer science and Internet societies to be involved...
I'm a student and have fast net access there, but the firewalls dont let you do too much... I definitely want broadband at home for games, etc...