INTERNET
Ireland gets poor marks for broadband
21-10-2005
by Deirdre McArdle
Yet another broadband survey has shown that Ireland is languishing at the bottom of the league table in Europe.
This time the survey comes courtesy of ECTA, the European association of alternative telecom service providers, which positioned Ireland 14th out of the 15 European Union Member States. Embarrassingly, the report shows that Ireland has been overtaken in terms of broadband penetration by some of the new EU member states, like Hungary, Slovenia and Lithuania.
The report, which tracks progress in broadband over the past year, reveals that Ireland is not catching up, but rather maintaining its position at the bottom of the table. ECTA outlines the damage that has been done to the Irish broadband market by the slow processes in place for unbundling the local loop.
It concludes that the leading broadband countries are those where competitors have been able to come in and build a share of the market using competing technologies. In these countries there is competition in broadband from DSL, LLU, and from cable networks.
"The evidence is clear: in France and the UK where action was taken on local loop unbundling and bitstream, they moved up three places in the broadband league table in 18 months," said Tom Hickey, chairman of ALTO, which represents ECTA in Ireland. "Italy also rose two places in the past two years as a result of its policy of building a path towards competition through bitstream and local loop unbundling; the countries at the top of the table are those with the highest LLU rates," Hickey concluded.
The report noted that countries at the bottom of the table were all similar in that the incumbent's market share was consistently bigger than in those at the top of the table, with new competitors providing less than 40 percent of broadband lines. In Ireland, new competitors provide only 37 percent of lines.
"Competition works, but competitors need to be able to access the copper loop in a reasonable manner to bring services to their customers," said Hickey, who went on to say that broadband penetration needs to be increased significantly.
"The ECTA report found that the countries with the highest broadband penetration had strong competition, with at least 50 percent of broadband lines being provided by competitors of the incumbent," said Hickey.
The ECTA study comes on the back of the OECD's Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2005 survey, which ranked Ireland 19th out of 22 countries. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary now have more households with high-speed internet access than Ireland, which has penetration of about 5 percent and is the fourth-worst performer in the league table. The only other countries ranking lower for the period from 2000 to 2004 were Mexico, Turkey and Greece.
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