I don’t usually post stuff here about Ireland Offline but this is an exception.
Ireland Offline and in particular Damien Mulley together with John Handelaar got together to make a map of all the broadband enabled telephone exchanges in Ireland. Along the way they accidently created a map showing what things would look like if every telephone exchange was enabled.
It makes for a stark comparison.
There are roughly 1100 exchanges in Ireland at the moment. As far as anyone knows outside of eircom, including Comreg and Minister Dempsey (Dept Marine Communications and Natural Resources), eircom plans to enable around 400 exchanges. The exact figure has never been made public but at best guess its 450. The remaining 650 should be funded by the tax payer according to eircom.
The first map shows Ireland with the known 400 exchanges enabled with the yellow circles representing the nominal reach of broadband from an exchange. The second map depicts Ireland if every exchange was enabled. And even within the yellow circles roughly 20% of telephone lines fail to carry broadband.
Little wonder that companies like Google and eBay refuse to locate in places like Athlone*.
* Will the Taoiseach elaborate, for example, on the fact that eBay has announced that it will not go to Athlone because the necessary infrastructure is not in place?
