Enterprise Ireland organises Pre-HPSU Information workshops

Good news for budding entrepreneurs:
Enterprise Ireland has organised a number of workshop for people that are feeling the itch to start their own business. The workshops are primarily targeted at potential HPSU’s.
“We will be running a series of short duration workshops on Entrepreneurship during May throughout the Mid-West Region to promote the notion of entrepreneurship as a career move/option. The workshops will be run over 2 consecutive evenings in Ennis, Nenagh and Tralee.

The workshop for North Tipperary will take place on the 21st/22nd May in the Abbey Court Hotel, Nenagh from 7-9.30pm.

The workshops are aimed at individuals/graduates with a business idea which has the potential to be scaled significantly within 3years and be export driven. Following on from the workshops, individuals may have the opportunity to progress to either a more in-depth six week Enterprise Start programmes, a 12month Enterprise Platform programme and/or engage with an EI development advisor on an individual basis with a view to developing a full business plan.

On the first evening of each workshop we plan to give participants an overview of the business development process with a specific focus on the market for the product/service, defining the actual value proposition, conducting market research, market development etc. This will be followed by a case study from a local entrepreneur (Templemore man Jimmy Martin, http://www.AMCS.ie for the Nenagh event) who will outline his experience of setting up a high growth business. On the second night we will cover the funding supports available via EI and VC’s and we will also have an input from an entrepreneur on their experience of raising finance, funding the start-up etc. We are currently getting promotional material printed and will be placing ads in local newspapers and radio in advance of each event. I will send the brochures to you as soon as I get them, any help you could give in terms of promoting the event to any of your clients would be great and they would be most welcome to attend.”

For more details contact:
Catherine Hogan
Senior Regional Development Executive
Enterprise Ireland
catherine.hogan-at-enterprise-ireland.com

Ireland’s broadband status: again more waffle than action…

Silicon Republic ran an “interesting article” some time ago describing all the good things that are being done to improve Irelands low level of  broadband penetration. The article was another one that was long on praise for Eircom and the Irish government but short on fact and insight. The general gist of the article is that now that the availability of broadband is reaching acceptable levels in Ireland, providers are looking at offering speeds higher than the “entry-level” 1-2 Mbps DSL products. While higher speeds would be a great improvement it is nothing to boast about. Service providers in most other European countries offer much higher speeds at prices lower than what Irish people are expected to pay for the paltry 1-2 Mbps packages. Ebay’s MD was right when he dubbed these services “fraud-band” instead of broadband.

The article discusses comments made by the Irish government and several providers (but mainly quotes Eircom soundbites). However there is no insight from spokespeople for the various industries that are losing their competitive edge in a global marketplace due to a lack of broadband.

The current availability of broadband in Ireland can be summarised in a few short sentences: Several forms of broadband (DSL, cable, wifi/wimax, fibre etc.) are available in the major urban centres. If you live or work outside these areas your choice is limited to (maybe) DSL and mostly wifi and/or satellite. Large areas can still only get Internet access by dialup, a technology that is being axed in a lot of European countries due to lack of interest. New entrants in the broadband market mostly start by offering their services in the same urban centres that already being over-serviced by the existing operators. Large swathes of urban areas are only being serviced by WISP’s that have sprung from grass-roots initiatives. These are quite often under-funded and struggling to cope with the demand. The Irish government is doing squat to assist these companies while continuously pandering to Eircom.

The debate has now been shifted to so-called Next Generation Networks (NGN’s). This is just a spin-doctors attempt to divert the attention form the real problem. The current infra-structure is simply not able to provide broadband to most rural (and some urban) areas. Even if every exchange in the country was upgraded to allow DSL type services and opened up to allow LLU it would still be unable to provide the required level of connectivity. Why? Because of the miles and miles of rotten 7 corroded copper that runs from the exchanges to the end-user premises. Apparently the line-failure rate runs at 40% at the moment. Yes, that’s right: 40%!!

Eircom keeps using the number of users connected to enabled exchanges as the number of broadband enabled users but this is plain and utter non-sense. Theoretical figures don’t mean anything, we need to look at the real numbers.

The best thing that has happened to the Irish broadband market in the last 10 years is the establishment of the Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN’s). Large rings of fibre optic cable put in place around large urban centres, cities as well as large and medium sized towns.  However the management of these networks was then contracted out to a company called E-Net who just sits on this huge assets rather than promoting the use of it. I recall asking one of their executives years ago how and who they planned to market these networks to. His answer was a surprised: “market? We’re only supposed to manage these networks”…..

Access to the MAN’s is only available by going through E-Net’s expensive and arduous application process.

 

So do I have any suggestions on how the current impasse can be solved? Off course I do!

If the MAN’s were made more accessible and affordable we would see a lot more smaller operators jumping into the market. Running fibre into rural phone exchanges and turning them into “mini-MAN’s” could turn them into jumping off points for more operators. If I wanted to bring broadband to the area I now live in I would need to put a backhaul into place running from a city over 50 miles away. If the local exchange had fibre running into it I would have provided broadband to the whole area years ago.

A quote that supports this point of view is by Dutch operator KPN’s vice-president John Quist:  “One of the cornerstones of KPN’s plans is that in our network rebuilding we will make it a fully open network,” says Quist. “This means that it will be open to all service providers. All operators can use the NGN in the same way as our own service provider KPN Retail.”

What we don’t need is government interference in market pricing and service levels. Open up the market and let free-market economics work away at the crappy providers, high prices and low service levels.

 

 

  

More about Barcamp..

My activities during Barcamp have just been extended; besides my talk about “The need for an alternative telecoms infrastructure in Ireland” I will now also sit on a panel discussing “Finding money for your start-up”.
Just so that people can have a bit of an idea of what the content of both is I will give a short outline below:

“The need for an alternative telecoms infrastructure in Ireland”
Rather than giving a big long talk spouting just my opinion on the deplorable state of broadband availability I hope to start a bit of an interactive discussion. I will give a short description of what I consider lies at the root of this problem and why I think that an alternative telecoms infra-structure is the only solution to this problem. After that I would very much have a open discussion on the subject. What I do not want is a session of Eircom, Comreg & governemnt bashing. There has been enough of this for the last few years and it does not lead to a solution to the problem.

“Finding money for your start-up”
This is a panel discussion so, apart from giving a quick outline on what’s involved in starting to raise funds by going through a SEC listing with the aim of trading on the OTC/BB, I will attempt to answer participants questions to the best of my ability.

E.

Radio gaga…..

“The last word” (a very popular radioshow in Ireland broadcasted by TodayFM) had scheduled a round table discussion on Broadband in Ireland. Participants were: Rex Combs, CEO of Eircom, John Doherty, ComReg Commissioner, Fran Rooney from Ice Broadband and Damien Mulley from IrelandOffline.
I have listened to these type of discussions again and again since 1995 when I first moved to Ireland and it normally consists of a lot of posturing, name-dropping and lip-service. In the end none if it really amounts to anything. Even Ireland Offline with all their good intentions have achieved very little since they were first formed. Yes, there is more broadband Internet available than 5 years ago but we are still near the bottom of the European statistics and I am fairly sure that the little growth that we have had would have happened anyway. Lobying or no lobying…

As this subject is close enough to my heart to sometimes bring my blood-pressure to dangerously high levels I decided to email the show with some questions that I would like them to ask the participants.
Below are my questions:

- Why all the talk about Local Loop Unbundling when this makes no real business sense ?

- What is ComReg doing to stimulate the establishment of an alternative telecoms infrastructure?

- Can ComReg explain the strange licensing structure the WiFi & Wimax frequencies that will only lead to interference between networks?

- What is causing the delay in the MAN rollout as supported by the EU (http://muniwireless.com/municipal/watch/1091).

- What has happened to all the funding allocated to the Group Broadband schemes that was never spent?

- On that note what is happening to ensure that the established GBS’s are achieving their targets?

Did these questions get featured? Off course not. Instead what we got was some general, rhetorical questions that were mostly brushed over. Most of the participants busied themselves spouting the usual buzzwords (wireless, WiFi, Wimax, FWA etc.) But to discuss the plan to bring Wimax to the 5 main urban areas, which are already served by DSL, cable, FWA & FTTH, while the majority of the rural areas are not or under-served by broadband is just puzzling to say the least.
I will not start blowing our own trumpet but this proves to me again that Wimax EU is jumping into a huge opening in the market.

To be fair I have to admit that I received an email from the show today.
Quote: “Hi Evert,

Thank you very much for getting in touch and for contributing your comments. I’m also sorry to read from Damien’s blog that you were disappointed with the outcome of the discussion. Please be assured that it is something we will be returning to in the new year so hopefully we will be able to cover many other aspects of the subject in time – it is very hard to have a satisfying and rounded discussion in the amount of time we are allotted in the show.

Please keep in touch if you feel there are developments we should be aware of, and I will give you a call when we are coming back to this in the new year.

Thanks again,

Regards ,

Patrick

Assistant Producer, The Last Word”

I will see what happens….

E.