Doing business in Ireland: Broadband woes - We’re still working off old copper cabling

IF IRELAND intends to be the best small country in the world in which to do business, something will have to be done about the country’s prehistoric broadband infrastructure.

The Government is counting on the National Broadband Plan to do just that, but with confusion over the size of the project, the timing of its rollout, and even who’s in charge of the plan, you can excuse businesses for not pinning their immediate hopes on it.

They’ll believe it when they see it and in the meantime they have to make do with a wholly inadequate infrastructure of copper wiring that effectively locks them out of some of the most crucial aspects of 21st-century commerce.