Firms 'satisfied' with telecoms services

20-05-2008

by Bryan Collins

The vast majority of Irish companies are happy with the telecoms service they are receiving, according to the latest report released by ComReg.

Between January and February of this year the communications regulator, with the help of statistical company Millward Brown IMS, questioned 524 SMEs and 50 corporates operating in the retail, financial, manufacturing, electronics and software sectors. The findings revealed 86 percent of businesses are satisfied with the broadband download speeds they are currently getting. Those companies who knew their speeds generally reported connections between 2Mbps and 10Mbps.

"[The report] shows that there is an increased use of products across on a variety of platforms. The general level of satisfaction seems to be good. Uptake and increasing competition has kicked in. There are still areas of the market that will drive greater efficiencies and improvements, but by and large the level of satisfaction identified by this survey from the communications regulator is good," said Tommy McCabe, director of the Telecommunications and Internet Federation in IBEC, speaking with ENN.

Some of the other findings include: 88 of SMEs have internet access, 98 percent of corporates have internet access and 82 percent of SMEs have a broadband package. The last statistic was mirrored by a marked decrease in the number of SMEs relying on dial-up packages.

"The majority of large corporates expressed a high level of satisfaction overall and are able to get more or less whatever telecoms service they wanted. They were able to do so at very favourable prices particularly for voice although some concerns were expressed about the price of data services," the report authors concluded.

Despite the general positive feeling, some of the surveyed companies operating on a national basis expressed concern about the level of telecommunications services available outside urban areas and said that this can impact on customers, suppliers and even employees looking to work remotely.

"More and more the model these days is about electronic trading. Everything is being done on the web, but often our customers don't have access to the sort of speeds that would allow this to happen," one company told the surveyors.

Those same companies also said that areas poorly serviced by fixed-wire broadband tend to be poorly served by 3G too. They also pointed out that they believed mobile networks are "a long way from being a close substitute for fixed wire".

However, despite this assessment the overall satisfaction level with mobile broadband was good. Usage wise, 16 percent of SMEs said they use HSDPA while 9 percent said they use 3G data cards. On the corporate side, take-up was even better; some 55 percent said they use HSDPA while 57 percent use 3G data-cards.

"Mobile broadband, the uptake is quite significant and that will continue to grow we hope. As higher speeds become available there is great acceptability associated with this. In the meantime, if you want very high speeds, then a fixed line is what is required," said McCabe.

The acknowledgement that the quality of broadband in rural areas is poor will come as little surprise to many people working in the telecommunications industry. The Government's National Broadband scheme, which is due to roll out this summer aims to bring broadband to the final 17 percent of the country that still cannot get connected. However, the patchy quality of broadband in rural areas does not seem to be impacting dramatically on the level of foreign investment according to the respondents.

"Has it been a barrier to us doing business here? Well I would say no. Clearly we've managed to secure new investment and we've managed to build a successful business and day-to-day it's not an obstacle for us. I'm not governed day-to-day by any bandwidth restriction. I have fantastic, you know we have fantastic broadband connectivity," one company said in the report.

The report concluded by saying that if Ireland wants to maintain the level of foreign direct investment being received here and take advantage of new technologies, further investment will be needed in the telecommunications industry.