Dec 04 2012
Wow – it has been a while since I blogged! I guess that I have been busy!
Anyway, I read with interest that Eircom has done a deal with Amazon whereby the former with resell the latter’s cloud computing services. For more details see Eircom signs cloud services deal with AWS.
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Oct 11 2010
The Irish Courts have said no to the music industries ridiculous demands for policing users’ activity! See Record companies lose illegal download case.
Brilliant! Well done to UPC for standing up for its users rights!
I wonder will Eircom reconsider its foolish position of cooperation now!
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Oct 04 2010
It is impossible not to notice that Eircom has launched a new mobile phone network operator called eMobile, due to the abundance of adverts in all of the mainstream media.
I must admit that I was initially baffled by this move, given that Eircom already owns a mobile phone network operator – Meteor. However, it appears that all Eircom is really doing is segmenting the market by age. This could be a sensible move, because Meteor is very strongly associated with teenagers (and practically nobody else).
For more information about this see Eircom launches new mobile brand, Eircom unveils new mobile strategy – eMobile has arrived, or Eircom Launches eMobile. The official Eircom press release is eircom’s New Mobile Service “eMobile” It’s For You!.
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Mar 30 2010
Last night I read that Eircom will start upgrading its broadband offering. You can read more about this in either Eircom unveils ‘next-generation’ broadband or on Eircom’s site. (Unfortunately, I cannot link to it because all the links appear to require a session ID :( Stupid!)
One of the main points of this announcement is that Eircom will upgrade existing 1MB/s, 3MB/s, and 7MB/s connections to 8MB/s connections free of charge. That is good news, although I am not sure how many people really need this extra speed.
The other interesting change is that Eircom will now charge users based on the amount of traffic transferred. I realise that I do not know how much I transfer at the moment. I must investigate this on the Eircom web site :o
Finally, I agree with IrelandOffline‘s assessment that there is a lack of “next generation” about this offering! See Eircom and “next-generation” broadband.
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Nov 24 2009
Delighted to read Threat to Eircom ‘three strikes’ plan. It will be interesting to see how Eircom reacts!
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Mar 12 2009
Eircom has been in the news over the last few days due to its broadband strategy:
An Eircom executive has said that people in rural Ireland who live more than 5km from a telephone exchange will never get broadband.
Eircom’s Paul Bradley said that even when the local exchange is upgraded to handle broadband, a modem will not connect as the signal becomes so weak after 5km.
I must admit that I do not see what all the fuss is about. Eircom is simply stating the obvious! You can read more about this in Eircom accused of abandoning rural Ireland and Eircom broadband spend under review, committee told.
It is not clear to me why people in rural Ireland have an expectation that they should be able to avail of the same level of broadband as people who live in urban centres. Do these rural dwellers also expect the proposed Metro for Dublin to extend to their towns? Or do they expect that they can have gas connections to their houses? There are advantages and disadvantages of living in rural or urban areas, and that the associated differences must be recognised!
Indeed, the story gained enough momentum to be featured on national television this evening. You can watch it online on at Eircom re-thinking rural broadband rollout. Damien Mulley, for whom I have a lot of respect, appeared on the program. However, I disagree with him on the significance that broadband has on rural Ireland. As part of his argument he compared broadband access in rural locations in Ireland with broadband access in Amsterdam! I think that this is a very flawed comparison for the obvious reasons!
I also disagree with what Damien said about Eircom blocking access to certain web sites, and in particular, he mentioned The Pirate Bay. I am currently using Eircom to access the Internet, and I appear to have full access to The Pirate Bay. Furthermore, I previously described how many ISPs blocked access a certain web page in Extreme Child Pornography Prevention Measures, but Eircom did not, and still does not, block access to this web page.
In my opinion, it would be significantly more beneficial to Ireland to have investment into providing greater bandwidth and more services into a few well chosen urban locations. In other words, concentrate resources to create a silicon valley in Ireland, rather than create a mediocre service covering the entire country.
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Feb 11 2009
The Irish Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) published a report earlier this week covering the attitudes of Irish residential customers to ICT. The report is very easy to read, and it contains many interesting findings. My favourite findings are:
The full report can be downloaded from ComReg Residential ICT Services Survey Q4 2008.
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Feb 04 2009
I have a regular land line to my house, and I buy both my voice and my broadband data services from Eircom. In general, I am happy with the price and service levels.
I subscribe to one of Eircom’s bundles that gives me free unlimited national and local calls, and this provides me with significant savings compared to paying for my calls on a per minute basis.
I rarely need to pay for any additional calls for two reasons:
However, the single greatest category of phone number that I regularly need to call that results in an increase to my phone bill is 1890 numbers. These numbers are intended to be non-geographical low cost numbers. Unfortunately, Eircom charges me for calling these numbers because they are not deemed to be national numbers. It is both annoying and petty!
In order to avoid these charges I started using the national numbers for organisation that have 1890 numbers. Most organisations list these somewhere on their web pages, often as the International Number. I think that a company must have a national number in order to obtain a 1890 number.
I recently came across a very useful web site, SayNoTo1890, that provides the national numbers for all known 1890 numbers. These numbers are well categorised, and they are updated regularly.
This is a great recession beating tip in my opinion ;)
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Jan 31 2009
I remember reading a while ago that some of the record companies were taking legal action against Eircom, because Eircom would not police and prevent illegal P2P music sharing within its network. I think that Eircom would have been mad to do this!
Like many other people, I think that the record labels are still living in the past by spectacularly ignoring the realities of current technology!
So I was very interested in reading this week that this action has been settled out of court. The agreement seems to centre on the record labels detecting illegal downloading themselves without any special access to Eircom’s network. They can then pass the relevant IP addresses to Eircom, and Eircom will serve the offending user with a warning. If the record companies detect that the user persists in sharing illegal music files then Eircom will disconnect the user.
I think that this is a big win for Eircom, and a big loss for the record companies, for the following reasons:
The full details about this are in Big four music labels and Eircom in landmark piracy settlement.
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Jan 20 2009
I previously wrote about the Irish Companies involved in W3C, so today I am going to list the Irish companies (and organisations) that are involved in the TM Forum. Again, I am basing these lists on the online membership list.
The Irish companies that are currently members are:
The non-Irish companies that have technical operations in Ireland that are currently members are:
At least I think that all of those companies have technical operations in Ireland. It can be very difficult to tell from their web pages.
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