The slow road to broadband
While government sources talk of the cloud computing industry being worth €9.5 billion here in a few years, employing up to 9,000, many farmers have to ask friends, family members or agents such as solicitors to help them when they need to access relevant websites to fill in forms online.
The onwave satellite broadband company spoke to 80 people at the Ploughing Championships, and 50 of them had no internet access on their farm or in their home, and 16 were still on slow dial-up or narrowband services.
Nearly 40 said there is no broadband availability in their area.
Farmers use broadband and the internet for livestock registration, banking, important applications to the Department of Agriculture, and to find information on farming practices, prices and trends, EU directives, etc.
Some of them will get access for the first time near the end of next year. They will take part in the Rural Broadband Scheme, designed by the Government to provide a service to any remaining rural dwellers which were not reached by the National Broadband Scheme which was completed in October 2010.
The Communications Department website was one of the places it was announced, and there seemed to be no other way to apply for the service except through the website.
Nevertheless, in the three months allowed, about 5,000 applications were received.
Unfortunately, roll-out of the service to successful applicants will not be completed until the end of 2012, said Government sources recently. That kind of delay is typical in Ireland’s development of communications, according to IrelandOffline, a voluntary lobby group campaigning for broadband internet access.
IrelandOffline, which is one of the better sources of information for those trying to get online, is pessimistic about delivery and quality of the Rural Broadband Scheme.
Their latest quarterly report shows Ireland is 72nd in the world for internet upload speeds and 24th out of 27 in the EU; 45th worldwide for download speeds and 23rd out of 27 in the EU; and 34th in the world for quality and 18th out of 25 in the EU.
The Government accepts that widespread availability of high speed broadband is a key requirement in delivering future economic and social development. With basic broadband services now available across Ireland, their challenge now is to accelerate the roll out of high speed services.
However that depends on the NewERA proposals in the Programme for Government, in which there is a commitment to co-invest with the private sector and commercial semi-state sector to provide next generation broadband customer access to every home and business.
Electronically marooned rural dwellers will be watching the Budget for progress, with fingers crossed.
So will those with high hopes for cloud computing. According to IrelandOffline, our main cities and employment centres now have significantly slower broadband speeds than recently cabled towns.
State of art broadband infrastructure is essential for success in cloud computing — many will fear that progress towards cloud computing could be just as slow and troubled as our rural broadband history.
