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A poverty of imagination?
04-02-2009
by Ralph Averbuch
It's interesting how Ireland's National Broadband Scheme (NBS) came out just ten or so days before the UK announced how it was aspiring to bring a 2Mbps connection to every household by 2012. We like to think Ireland is way behind the UK, but some 40pc of UK households have no broadband currently. Meanwhile Ireland's NBS programme, being fulfilled by mobile company 3, will apparently offer 2.3Mbps by the same period with a monthly cap of 15GB. Frankly both the UK and Ireland's 'vision' is a little lacking. For starters both countries appear to be wedded to solutions originally intended for mobile telecommunications. Now heralded as the solution to the rural digital divide, Ireland will pay to extend broadband to the last 10pc of the population, covering 33pc of the country. But here's the issue. We can be absolutely certain that demand for bandwidth in Ireland, like everywhere else, is going to rise exponentially and even at this stage the performance figures for this planned network seem very modest. Short of the huge cost of fiber to every Irish household, are we seriously to believe there's no better way to spend taxpayer's money? There may well be good arguments against alternatives such a WiMax for rural Ireland but it would have been reassuring to hear them fully aired before the money was committed to what may prove to be a technological stop-gap.
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