Broadband - Ireland in the relegation zone

http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9650270

From 21 October 2005

"This time the survey comes courtesy of ECTA, the European association of alternative telecom service providers, which positioned Ireland 14th out of the 15 European Union Member States. Embarrassingly, the report shows that Ireland has been overtaken in terms of broadband penetration by some of the new EU member states, like Hungary, Slovenia and Lithuania. "

It goes on:

"ECTA outlines the damage that has been done to the Irish broadband market by the slow processes in place for unbundling the local loop.

It concludes that the leading broadband countries are those where competitors have been able to come in and build a share of the market using competing technologies. In these countries there is competition in broadband from DSL, LLU, and from cable networks.

"The evidence is clear: in France and the UK where action was taken on local loop unbundling and bitstream, they moved up three places in the broadband league table in 18 months," said Tom Hickey, chairman of ALTO, which represents ECTA in Ireland. "Italy also rose two places in the past two years as a result of its policy of building a path towards competition through bitstream and local loop unbundling; the countries at the top of the table are those with the highest LLU rates," Hickey concluded."