Broadband rollout five years behind - Vital infrastructure

UNDER the 2011 Programme for Government, a high-speed fibre broadband service was to be delivered to 90% of homes and businesses within four years.

Despite the ongoing rhetoric of the coalition partners, it now looks like it will take another six years to achieve that, a failure that could have major implications for our economy and even stall a still very fragile recovery.

Instead of the programme being close to completion, 40% of the population remains outside the reach of high-speed broadband, let alone fibre optic services.

We have been here before on the communications byways. The creaking broadband infrastructure is similar to the situation that pertained in the early 1980s when Ireland had one of the worst telephone communications systems in the developed world.

Setting up Telecom Éireann in 1983 was the catalyst for economic advancement. The government of the day ploughed money into the state company and it proved to be a very wise investment.

By the early 1990s, the Irish network was amongst the most modern and most digitalised in the world and by the middle of that decade had become 100% digitally switched. Much of the credit can go to Albert Reynolds, a savvy rural-based businessman who, as minister for posts and telegraphs in 1979, saw the importance of spending on the communications infrastructure, even in the teeth of a recession.

Fianna Fáil’s communications spokesman, Michael Moynihan, has criticised the Government for repeatedly missing key targets on the rollout of fibre broadband.

It is to be expected that he would make political capital out of this, but he nonetheless makes an important point on the substantive issue: The urban-rural divide.

“We’ve also seen the emergence of a real digital divide where private operators are investing in upgrading their broadband infrastructure in urban areas while rural Ireland is being neglected,” he says.

Other small countries with equally open economies have already seen the importance of high-speed broadband. In Sweden, for instance, many towns and cities own their own fibre networks. Even far poorer countries than Ireland like Bulgaria, Latvia, and Portugal, have more advanced systems.

Ireland ranks 42 in the global rankings for the distribution of high-speed broadband. In the region of 40% of the population and 96% of the country still lacks commercial or fibre broadband services.

Like public transport, commercial enterprises are slow to invest in rural areas, where returns are not as immediate or as lucrative. The alternative, therefore, must be public investment, which, considering the precedent set more than 30 years ago, will be well rewarded.

It is unlikely that, without strategic investment in the 1980s, we would have had the Financial Services Centre or, indeed, the Celtic Tiger.

We need that kind of vision again, allied to a sense of urgency that appears to be lacking at government level.