BE strike [Read 1st post before posting]

kildarecommuter wrote: »

And in later years it became telecom eireann a semi state and worked quite well.
And then it was privatised ....

I'm sorry WHAT!! :eek:

Telecom Eireann was an insane basket case. We were paying the highest line rental in the world for terrible service. We were paying per second for dial up internet and no sign of them bothering with broadband.

They literally had offices full of old ladies who just sat their knitting! Why? Because they were the ladies who used to operate the switchboards before it was automated. Couldn't fire them because they were semi state employees, but refused to do any other job (E.g. phone support, etc.) as their job title was switch board operator!

How do I know all this? Well the reason I'm on boards.ie is because I use to be a committee member of IrelandOffLine, the group who fought for broadband to be introduced in Ireland. I sat in meetings with the Minister of Communications, trying to convince him to force Eircom to introduce FRIACO. Which he did, giving us affordable internet and literally two months later broadband.

Telecom Eireann was horribly inefficient and was doing everything in it's power to screw over the people of Ireland and hold the country back :mad:

As for the privatisation of Eircom. I and almost everyone involved in IOFFL, was completely against it and warned that handing a private company a monopoly like that would be a disaster. Everything we predicted would happen, did :mad:

What we had recommended was that Telecom Eireann should be split into two companies. A Network Company, who owned the entire network and had a small staff to manage it, which would stay under state ownership and an operations companies that would have everything else, including most of the staff and which could be privatised. The state owned network company could then allow any company who wanted it access to the network on an equal basis.

All of the above would have avoided most of the problems with Eircom.

We weren't listened too at the time, but it is interesting to note that this model was later taken up for future "privatisations", for instance how the ESB has been broken into a separate network company, generation company and retail company, etc.

BTW Eir today is finally a much healthier company and is firing on all cylinders now. Ireland now has actually surpassed the UK in terms of quality of broadband in urban areas at least, we are in the top 20 countries in the world in terms of quality of broadband and now we are following the lead of the Scandinavians, rolling out 1GB/s Fibre To The Home in rural Ireland, which will help shot us way past most of Europe.

Irelands telecoms industry is now doing extremely well. There is decent competition in the market and we the people are benefiting from it greatly.

Here is the thing, I'm not in favour of monopolies. Monopolies are bad for the public, they tend to screw the public over. But monopolies don't have to be just private (like Eircom), they can and often are public too (BE). BE are a great example of a semi state monopoly which is damaging to the public and returns bad value for money.