Gavan Reilly

It’s coming! To all of Ireland! Except…

• It’s being provided by 3 Ireland, the most unreliable mobile broadband provider of the three main mobile networks, with 386 pages of complaints on a megathread on Boards.ie
• Everyone in the country is expected to use a USB dongle. No, seriously. A USB dongle.
• the National Broadband Scheme now apparently only covers the “last 10% of the Irish population”, and so the Government saw fit to seek tenders instead of letting the market go after the other 400,000 peeople – without even seeing if takeup would be good enough?
• 3 will have to spend 21 months doing building at 390 locations, “160 of which are new”. To provide basic high-speed mobile services for 400,000 people?!
• 3 are committed to getting it done “within the 21 month deadline”, but are forgetting “a requirement for planning permission and scope for possible delays if appeals are lodged”

If anything positive has come from it, it looks like we may at least have a new telecommunications saviour in our midst.

Labour described the schme as underwhelming, with Senator Alan Kelly criticising the speeds provided under the plan. He described Minister Ryan’s moves as ‘a hodge-podge of wireless, satellite and land line solutions and that will leave Ireland in the technological dark ages’.

Frankly, when my parents’ house is still struggling to get a phone line 26 months after moving in, I couldn’t give a monkeys if 3 are going to spend millions so that we have can have a shitty USB dongle when we already have a shitty O2 one in the first place.

Sometimes I wonder if the Green Party have a bet on somewhere, with an underground bookies in Angola, seeing if they can become the world’s worst Government party of all time. Here’s a tip: put money on Eamon Ryan getting whipped across the face with a USB dongle if he comes within twenty paces of me.