Comreg have sanctioned a new line rental increase for eircom

Comreg have sanctioned a new line rental increase for eircom(or have they?)

This will make us the most expensive country in europe for telecommunications with the least advanced telecommunications network and services (both mobile and fixed line)

This is not a guess or an estimate...its a fact.

The problem here is that our regulator seems to be "making stuff up" and we need to look to the UK regulator for actual hard facts.

So according to our own regulator we are the cheapest. Yet using the same figures the UK finds that we are the most expensive in Europe for telecommunications.


For instance:
pg 59-61
In 2005, Japan had the highest per capita telecoms spend with an average £592 over the year, followed by Ireland with £520. (Figure 2.14). Average spend in the US and the other European countries studied all fell into the £350-£450 per year range


Here is a link to the UK regulators report:
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/icmr06/icmr.pdf

Questions:
So why the difference between our regulator and the UK regulator?
What are Comreg hiding and why are they allowing an increase?
If our per capita spend is so high why are eircom looking for more money?
If we spend as much as the Japanese why don't we have similar "modern" services?

Comreg utterances

more wonderous quotes from the abbey street gang (Comreg)

"We are one of the best providers of access products. The European Commission defined us as the third most open market in Europe. There seems to be no recognition of the progress that has been made on broadband. We have one of the cheapest broadband services, taken up by 8% of the people. We have one of the highest trajectory growth paths. People seem to ignore the fact that we are ten times as high in local loop unbundling as we were 12 months ago, which is genuine progress."

Telecoms Poodle

The fabled Irish telecommunications regulator, Comreg (affectionately known as Comwreck) The one that doesn't actually do anything.

The glorious morons that when trying to interpret the EU directive concerning Functional Internet Access , gave us 0k (that's zero) as a working speed. Then they relented and gave us 28k (yes 28k) in the 21st century. This mythical 28k is couched in so many maybes and hopefully type comments as to be utterly useless.

It also somehow managed to regulate for the incumbent and let them get away with charging the highest line rental in the EU, if not the whole world. For our exorbitant line rental we get no guarantees of any type of service.

This shows the contempt that the Irish regulator has for those it is supposed to be protecting, the hapless consumers of Ireland.

Kafka would be proud.