Dempsey talking balderdash on broadband
Issued : Thursday 21 September, 2006
Labour’s Communications Spokesperson, Tommy Broughan, has slammed Minister Noel Dempsey’s comments trumpeting the advances in broadband rollout during his time as Communications Minister.
Deputy Broughan said, “Minister Dempsey’s announcement this morning that the current 410,000 level of broadband subscribers has “smashed the target I set with several months to spare” is disingenuous in the extreme.
“The Minister’s original target in his Department's 2004 broadband policy directive was for 500,000 subscribers by mid-2005 and 600,000 plus subscribers by the end of 2006. When it was increasingly clear that this target would not be reached, instead of establishing a more effective policy, the Minister simply decided to change the target and downgraded his broadband goal to reaching 400,000 by the end of 2006.
“Dempsey’s assertion that 30% of Irish households now have a broadband service is frankly untrue (with the rollout barely keeping pace with new housing construction in the past four years). By the internationally respected measurement of broadband lines per capita, Ireland has still barely reached 9 lines per capita as compared to Denmark (29.3), Netherlands (26.8), and even the UK (18.9).
“Minister Dempsey seems unable to grasp the fact that there remains a serious Irish broadband deficit. Thousands of families and businesses can either not access broadband services, or pay unjustifiably high prices for an inferior service. Survey after survey from a range of eminent international organisations, most recently the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA), have flagged Ireland’s ongoing poor broadband performance and our disastrous ranking in EU and global broadband league tables.
“At the same conference where Minister Dempsey got carried away with the mediocre advances he has overseen in broadband rollout, distinguished commentators from organisations such as Forfas pointed out the serious challenges that still remain in the Irish broadband market. Ireland is still largely rolling out introductory broadband connections of 0.5 megabits while world leaders like Korea and Japan have installed up to 100 megabits of bandwidth.
“The reality is that when the election comes, Dempsey and his government will have dismally failed Ireland in rolling out broadband.”
