“€500m broadband investment for rural Ireland” so screamed the headline from Conor Pope’s piece in The Irish Times technology section, dated the 25th of April 2014 last. Well it’s about time is all we can say. We are a rural business, so rural that the neighbours are cows (the 4 legged type obviously!) and on a windy day chickens can often be seen flying involuntarily past the office window. Our virtual team spans from Dublin down to Tippeary, via the main office in Laois. Like any rural business trying to reach wider markets, broadband is extremely important to us. So we read Conor’s piece with great excitement, hope and anticipation.
But whilst it’s welcome news that this superman sized broadband is on it’s way, don’t pop the champagne corks just yet. We won’t even make the 100 years anniversary of the 1st transatlantic telephone call. Pat Rabbit has declined to put an exact time frame on when the roll-out would be complete but “he indicated it would take at least three years before the process was close to completion” according to Conor Pope. Three years is a long time in business.
How is it possible that on the 1st of April 1880 Alexander Graham Bell conducted the world’s first wireless telephone call on Bell and Tainter’s photophones? This was a distant precursor to fiber-optic communications that companies such as UPC are currently actively selling on TV. Super families with beaming smiles peer out from the TV screen, promising a great life after you install UPC’s fibre optic broadband. Usain Bolt and Virgin are no better and Sky taunt us with the same promises. But it seems to be only available to the select few. Surely something has gone wrong in the 100 year’s hence when we cannot have broadband of any description in much of rural Ireland?
We, like other rural businesses, depend on satellite broadband to keep our team connected to each other and to the rest of the world. We pay almost twice as much as the urban based business broadband fees who benefit from bundles. We are exposed to a monopoly as the only company who can get us a half decent connection are Digiweb. We use the Tooway product and we estimate we lose about 3 days a month due to satellite downtime. Our experience was backed up by Ger Barron from KBO when he explained that the downtime “is because (the Tooway system) it has limitations with allowance and contention as it has reached it’s maximum customer base in ROI”. Ger got our hopes up when he confirmed that KBO offers “point to point wireless broadband with unlimited usage” but he then cruelly snatched all hope away from us by finishing his sentence with “but not in your area”!
When we approached UPC they replied with a generic email from customer service stating the following:
“Unfortunately we are currently not able to provide service at your location. We will, however, keep your details on file and let you know once the service is available”
So for all of you trying to conduct business in rural Ireland, this article is dedicated to you. We think it’s time to make Mr. Rabbit realise that this is a serious issue for all of us (you know the “not D4 crowd”). Nice to note that he did refer to us rural businesses in Conor’s article: “Urban Ireland has a good a level of connectivity as anywhere in Europe but there are many parts of rural Ireland where there is only a basic service and that is not acceptable. People in rural areas are as entitled to broadband as anyone else”.
I just hope we are in the 1000 rural towns and villages who have been targeted for fibre based connections. Maybe if we were an American startup company and our name was Intel or Dell or Apple?
