Pat reported this morning that Smart Telecom’s phone service was down. Their upstream provider, Eircom, cut them off for non-payment of bills leaving 40,000+ of Smart’s customers with no phone service.
Were I cynical I’d suggest that Eircom did this as a cheap means of acquiring 40,000+ new customers.
The Irish telecom’s regulator, ComReg (aka Eircom’s lapdog) knew this was coming for a long time and never bothered stepping in to try to resolve the dispute - why would they? It is not as if ComReg gives a toss about the consumer. Nope, yet again they (in)acted in Eircom’s interest.
It will be interesting to see what position Isolde Goggin will be offered in Eircom when she steps down as ComReg Chair.
Damien posted the following table of international broadband data from the ITU
Notice Japan has 50mb broadband for less than $32 per month?
According to Damien the comparable Irish figures are:
eircom broadband business plus - 4MB - €107.69 inc vat
eircom broadband business enhanced - 5MB - €204 inc vat
Digiweb Metro Plus - 5MB - €78.65
Digiweb Metro Xpress - 8Mb - €163.35
The Irish minister for communications broadband suppression should be shot or at least fired for gross incompetence.
ComReg is the Irish telecoms poodle as opposed to the Irish Telecoms regulator which is what they claim to be! This is the organisation which has presided over Ireland being one of the most expensive countries in Europe for broadband and consequently Ireland having one of the lowest rates of uptake for broadband in Europe.
As a regulator, ComReg is worse than useless because they do nothing to help the rollout of broadband and thus are part of the problem.
So when you get the telecoms regulator rolling over every time Eircom says “boo!” you know you have a telecoms poodle not a regulator.
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