Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

The two main shareholders in Cablelink where RTE and TE from what I remember. Cablelink was way ahead with cable broadband and was demonstrating speeds of around 384Kb in 1998. That was way ahead of TE but TE was actually testing ADSL arund then. Cablelink needed to upgrade much of its networks. TE was a debt free organisation and was developing well. It would probably have been able to roll out ADSL broadband before Cablelink could roll out cable broadband only for the government screwing things up with privatisation. Ironically, privatisation turned Cablelink into a major player and the privatisation of TE nearly destroyed it. It was critical national infrastructure and the morons in government sold it.

The Elektor books were great for ideas. The text size used to be much smaller than that of the magazine and they typically left out the PCB designs It was a really innovative magazine. It published a design for a satellite TV receiver in 1985 or 1986 and satellite TV hadn't really gone mainstream by that time.

It is entirely possible that they could remain that way.

thats a bit strange alright

Cablelink began trialling high-speed Internet services in 1998. Telecom Eireann beat them by a whisker, trialling ADSL in 1997 and deploying the first instance of FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet) based broadband in Ennis in 1998. The latter was part of the Information Town initiative.

0/10

Which seems to an average for you.

Eircom/TE formally launched ASDL broadband in 2002 the issue was the slow rollout as implied by JMCC.

How far back we are now is a matter for (sometimes heated) debate. I would suggest that we are right up there with the best of them. :) Certainly the rollout of NBI Fibre has been a great success. Starlink, and other similar technologies coming on stream, allow everyone in the country have high speed broadband, even where that is not available.

Strange days. Most people then were worried about flat-rate dial-up.

The problem with replacing fibre with copper is such things as elders panic alarms, house alarms etc that are built for copper. There is a lot of those panic alarms in rural ireland and some in mobile phone blackspots

Indeed. Another is that battery backup is required, at home and network ends, to maintain service during a power outage. Disgracefully, battery backup is not provided at some network nodes, even for mobile service. Cost cutting goes on and on… Were I to need a personal alarm, I'd be using the Apple Watch Emergency SOS service, with satellite backup.

Worth noting that many elder alarms, house alarms, etc, do actually work with VoIP. Plug them in to the PSTN port on the modem, and away you go.

? At what age will I be considered an elder? (Mary Robinson's lot might have a vacancy :) )

Yeah, when I first got DSL in '96 (2Mb/s up/down) there was no Internet in Ireland. For me it just meant doing some work from home, using remote lan login. However, my daughter used to play "Settlers" online with a group of Germans. They really minded her, once they realised she was only a teen.

I then changed job, moved down the country, and had a major job getting broadband. The were no official spare cables on my rural route and my initial phone installation shared a copper pair with my neighbours using a "Pair Gain" system.

There are no constraints IIUC on the fibre, but the Irish providers have never offered a synchronous service, unlike other countries.
For instance I have a 1Gb/s service only because I want the higher upload speed which is only 100Mb/s.
If a 500/500 were offered I would choose that.
I suspect a lot of others might also, as a lot of services these days require uploading data.

Most people don't give a f*** about upload speed.

Most people don't even know what upload is.

I'm curious as to why upload would be so important? Plex server or something?

Some people doing large database updates on servers need bandwidth. On the download side of things, the daily zone files for the gTLDs (all the .COM/NET/ORG/etc domain names and nameservers) is approximately an 8GB download each day.