Brendan Ryan (Labour)

There is a degree of mystery about the extraordinary ineptitude of the present regime, in its two manifestations from 1997 to today, in dealing with broadband. As I just told Senator Ross, this is one issue for which it cannot blame anybody else. No preliminary work was required. In 1997, at a time when nobody here knew much about broadband, it was being discussed in some of the chattier corners of the Internet. I have figures on the growth in speed since the dial-up era which show how recent this development has been. The Government, therefore, has no excuse because nothing was lacking.

For reasons which are still difficult to penetrate, the Government took off on the glorious tangent of privatising the country's most important infrastructure, its telecommunications network. This decision left us with an incompetent telecommunications quasi-monopoly which has done what it liked and has boasted to international bankers that there was no reason to worry about the telecommunications industry being caught by the regulator. Major international banks have indicated that one of the qualities of Eircom is that it is well able to outmanoeuvre the regulator. Nobody wants to do anything about it and that is a crux of the issue.

The Government plays games with statistics and, I suppose, politicians always do so. It talks about the growth in broadband penetration. The point is that it is growing faster elsewhere. Growth in broadband penetration in the last quarter was 19% while it was 28% in the previous quarter. We are going backwards. The fundamental fact is that the level of broadband penetration here is down compared to countries such as Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia and Cyprus, which has problems because of its geographical isolation. We have some consolation in that Greece is behind us so at least we are not visible at the end of the queue. That is the fundamental fact.

The Government can make all the excuses it likes but as it does so not only are we not catching up, we are falling further behind because the rate of broadband penetration is so slow. Does anybody have an idea of the level of frustration among people living in cities who have been told by Eircom they cannot have broadband because there is a copper wire connection which was put in sometime between the flood and the arrival of the Lord, which has been there ever since and which is entirely unsuitable or because it has complicated, cheapskate connections made by Telecom Éireann or by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs 25 years ago which Eircom refuses to upgrade since it is not focused on its primary job, namely, to provide a good telecommunications service?

We hear about the growth in broadband access and, thankfully, it is getting a little better. We hear about broadband penetration which is not even moderate; it is abysmal. Real countries which are really progressing, such as the Netherlands, have three times the level of broadband penetration we have. France has twice the level of broadband penetration we have while Sweden has, effectively, three times the level. People in this Government, perhaps not in the majority party but in the minority one, will point to countries such as that and describe its failed economic model and state that ours is the thrusting model of the new liberalised market economy even though we have not done the most fundamental thing properly, that is, to provide the telecommunications infrastructure the country needs to have a future.

That is bad enough, but what the Government wants to do is inept. The reason is that in the majority of what now masquerades for broadband, we are talking about a maximum band width of approximately two to three megabytes per second. A domestic user will get one megabyte per second for a price which is among the highest in Europe. This year in France and the Netherlands, they are talking about speeds which are ten times faster than what we aspire to over the coming years. That is the difference. We are trying to build a single carriageway when they are building motorways because this Government cannot use its imagination and see what is needed.

What Senator Finucane said is a classic example of the ineptitude. Having told people to go in one direction, the Government is suddenly saying to hold on, there is something wrong and that it is going to go in a different direction. There are profound technological and technical arguments about the limitations of wireless broadband. It lacks the capacity for multiple use. There are inherent restrictions which mean it will always be a worse solution. It may be an acceptable solution in some isolated rural areas but to suggest it as a solution for any urban area is another matter.

Growth is going backwards and broadband penetration is nearly at the bottom of the league table. There is also the question of the quality of the service. People will tell one it breaks down. Although I do not have that problem with the Eircom service, many people do. The alleged speed is three megabytes per second in my case. I test it because there are many software packages on the Internet. It never reaches anywhere near three megabytes per second. It usually just about reaches 1.2 megabytes on a good day. If one hits it on a bad day, it will drop down to approximately 0.5 megabytes per second. Nobody is even talking about this. The Government is just wheeling it out because it is suddenly embarrassed.

I will move on to another contention, which is the number of people who can use the same broadband connection at the same time. One should try it out on a Saturday night where I live in Cork and see how slow it is. Not only will we have traffic jams, we will have broadband jams because we will not build the quality of infrastructure which will give people the speed they need at the time they need it.

I am sick of the phrase "rocket science". Rocket science is actually quite easy. It is not hard to figure this out. Anybody should be able to understand the analogies between broadband availability on a crude level and road traffic or water flowing through a pipe. If one tries to squeeze too much through a pipe, nothing will not go through it.

We are trying to introduce broadband on the cheap, with the case cited by Senator Finucane being a classic example. This happened in Ireland ten or 15 years ago when somebody — I believe it was the Department of Finance, which is the most negative influence on Irish public policy — refused to allow proper roads to be built so we ended up with roundabouts where we should have had flyovers, with the result that there was chaos. Now we are back to the same issue again.

I know one of the best guest houses in the west Kerry Gaeltacht and, as a result of sheer frustration, the owner has now installed satellite broadband at great expense to herself because so many of her customers wanted access to broadband but nobody could give it to her. There is a long list of such examples.

I will quote a far better known former resident of Cork than myself. Roy Keane famously said that if one fails to prepare, one can prepare to fail. In terms of the telecommunications revolution and what the Government has not done, we should be beginning to prepare to fail because we are so far behind and the world is moving so far ahead of us that the gap will become unbridgeable and we will be left behind with the result that major future investment will go elsewhere where there are governments with public policy capable of delivering the quality which is unimaginable to those making public policy here at present.