Politicians and political parties love to throw around buzzwords.
In Ireland we have got used to terms like:
“digital economy”
“knowledge economy”
and, of course, “celtic tiger”.
Labour have released a document with the rather pretentious title of “Plan for Digital Ireland”. Download it. Read it and try not to spill too much coffee all over yourself.
Their headline:
Next-generation broadband is an essential component of our economic recovery. The availability of high speed broadband is crucial for business and job creation, as well as being key to attracting outside investment.
Um .. really? Ok, it would be nice if higher speeds were available everywhere, but the reality is that companies are offering faster speeds in most of the population centres. UPC, for example, have a 30 meg product which is available all over the country as far as I know.
Do we really need to spend 20 thousand euro per household on broadband?
Seriously?
And for a document that purports to be a roadmap for Ireland’s digital future, why isn’t there a single mention of IPv6 in there? It’s not mentioned once. There’s no mention of security in the entire document either.
There are, of course, plenty of nice fluffy words that are going to make some journalists’ mouths water..
Of course if an Irish political party were to actually make a statement about technology that actually made any sense I’d probably die of shock!
I just read a briefing document written by a British legal “expert” on internet issues who states that the law can be used effectively to stop the publishing of information online. Clearly he hasn’t heard of Wikileaks.
There are a lot of people who really don’t “get” the Internet as a community which means they don’t understand non profit related cooperation on security issues or why people share things online if they are not trying to make money from them.
I have UPC, in Dublin. Only time you ever appraoch the advertised speeds is sometime around 2am.
Its called investment for the future and laying down an infrastructure for next 20 years.
Who could have predicted requirement for growth in bandwidth over last decade
As Cathal points out, UPC doesn’t actually offer 30 meg. The mis-information that is being put out there is why in the document Labour insist that ComReg will mandate companies to use average speeds rather max speeds, so people can see how far behind other countries we are.
The real next generation of broadband, the one that South Korea, Scandinavia and others are embracing, is FTTH.
Furthemore, UPC isn’t available all of the country. It’s available primarily in urban areas, but not all urban areas. There are still parts of Dublin that can’t use UPC.
I don’t know where you live but I’m guessing it’s Dublin. Broadband is still a major issue those of us living outside the pale. I was still using 56k dialup a year and a half ago. I now have very slow ISDN and it’s my only available option. I know many people who live outside major cities and would work from home if they had better broadband connections. But they can’t. Likewise small businesses are crippled by slow and unreliable connections, even close to major urban areas. It’s been a decade of broken promises from the government and misleading advertising by companies.