Broadband speeds lag well behind Europe
A study on broadband available to consumers in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick has found that, on average, users with fixed lines benefit from just 60% of advertised speeds.
The research, the first of its kind undertaken here, covered popular broadband activities such as web surfing, downloading music and movies, and found that “Irish fixed line broadband consumers receive only 60% of the bandwidth speed advertised, on average mobile broadband consumers achieve only 64% of advertised speed, on average faster broadband services do not deliver equally faster web-browsing speeds.
“Browsing over mobile broadband is considerably slower compared to fixed line broadband services advertised at similar speeds,” the report by the Epitiro Internet monitoring firm states.
Liz McManus, Labour spokesperson on communications, said she was concerned that the crucial allocation of broadband to rural areas would become a political football.
“The National Broadband Scheme is urgently needed to address the needs of those areas not currently served by broadband,” she said.
“This Government is clearly not taking the broadband issue seriously. We are already lagging behind the EU average, ” she said.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin communications spokesperson Martin Ferris described the report on broadband speeds as only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the poor delivery of broadband across the state.
“It is totally unacceptable that companies are not providing the broadband speeds they claim and are in effect ripping their customers off. To make matters worse there are also parts of the country where there is no broadband availability contrary to the claims of broadband providers,” he said.
The results were compiled following more than five million tests on the services offered by nine companies.
Overall, Smart Telecom was deemed to be the best of the providers surveyed, followed by BT Ireland and Digiweb.
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