Blog
Is the tiger moving north?
09-12-2009
by Ralph Averbuch
Infrastructure investment in the north highlights the shortfall in strategic vision down south.
Some credit must go to those people at Ireland Offline for continuing to bang on their drum. Whilst most of us can be online in some fashion, it sometimes feels it's literally down to good luck, a fair wind and lots of sticking plasters. Those of us lucky enough to be in city centres or on the route of a cable network are fortunate. There's little incentive in the market to seek out diminishing returns by chasing low-density conurbations where the whole infrastructure needs root and branch updating, making each customer acquisition so expensive per capita as to make no business sense at all. That's why there needs to be some form of effective intervention to pick up where the free market can't (and won't) go. So to Ireland Offline's recent rant about the iniquity of a situation where Northern Ireland is expected to have something like 20 times more fibre than the Republic by 2011. That's 1,150 new BT fibre nodes across the north in the next 18 months. BT is coughing up a little over half the implementation costs with the rest coming from government and EU funding. When it's done there will be a minimum guaranteed connection of 2Mbps for all businesses in Northern Ireland. It does beg the question, will we see similar activity in the south? So far it's not looking too promising. Ireland Offline's Michael Watterson sums up thus, "The price of failure to compete with our peers in the Global Knowledge economy is economic oblivion. As our developed peers all move smartly towards the high speed ‘cloud computing’ future we in Ireland are left peering through a dark dank drizzle of failed green policies”. His language is definitely emotive and apocalyptic but he's got a point. Ireland is heavily reliant on its intellectual assets for economic success. Those assets can only realise their full potential if they have access to at least the same level of connectivity as our immediate European partners. Otherwise there really is a danger that we'll fall way behind once again. Is it worth risking all the hard-fought gains Ireland's achieved only to be lost for lack of strategic vision?
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Not a chance
The north has never had, and never will have, anything other than a second rate economy. All the fibre in the world wont result in a decent salary for the tens of thousands of graduates each year.
I suggest researching the average salary in the north - its a joke and the "government" is more concerned about looking the part rather than ensuring young people can go out and make a career for themseleves.
Flatter to deceive is the order of the day for everything in the north.
by M Kelly on 11 December 2009 at 13:43