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The main problem though is that they control all the actual physical lines and others have to lease bandwidth so I can see them quite happily using this shit as a stick to beat their competitors.

We have this problem in Australia. Telstra, what came out of the government owned Australia Telecom when it was privatised in the 90's owns all the copper in Australia (95% of which was laid by the government using public money) but the main problem is fixed by the fact that the Telecoms regulator fixes the price at which Telstra can resell their copper lines and DSL services. This price is set at a level where Telstra can make a profit above the cost of line maintenance but Telstra constantly complains to the regulators as their other business units are losing money (having to support 3 different cellular transmitter networks when other networks only support two). Currently Telstra are stonewalling the National Broadband Network project which is intended to provide FTTN (Fibre To The Node) to Australian households, Telstra opposes this because the government refuses to grant them the same monopoly over fibre lines as they have over copper lines.

I don't know what the Irish regulators are like but I always assumed the EU and member states had some good consumer protection laws.

Our friendly national telco here in Ireland, Eircom gives me a lovely warning message when I try to access it with Mozilla, some crap about others being able to see my username and password. I knew MS had our government in a headlock, but wow, this is a new low. Anyone feels like complaining, let them know ;-)

Not sure if it applies to Firefox, but I'd guess yes.

Our friendly national telco here in Ireland, Eircom gives me a lovely warning message when I try to access it with Mozilla, some crap about others being able to see my username and password. I knew MS had our government in a headlock, but wow, this is a new low. Anyone feels like complaining, let them know ;-)

Not sure if it applies to Firefox, but I'd guess yes.

I doubt that this will have any impact on those dialers. What was the research done to determine that most of these dialers are infact dialing to South Pacific islands?

Of course it will. If the dialers can't dial these numbers the custoemr can't get ripped off.

Numerous complaints about these charges to Eircom (Our countries defacto telecomunications monopoly) have been ignored. Many customers have been left out of pocket. Thats why the usually toothless ComReg has taken action.

The best way, as a starter, would be to educate Joe average how harmful these dialers can be, and instead of going on blocking direct dialing to specific zones, wouldn't it also help much better if the user knew how to recognize, avoid, detect and eliminate such scams?

The people tha have been ripped off are generally not the tech savvy kind. They are not going to listen to this "education" anymore than they listen to traffic laws. Generally people will only care about it after they have been done over. These trojan dialers go to great lengths to conceal their presence.

See also Ireland offline for more info.

Pooh pooh. 360c per minute to a couple of the countries involved is the highest rate there is, according to their own call calculator. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is not excessive. And if it bothers you that much, switch to Esat.

Link here for those interested.

Now all we need is for our national telco to roll out ADSL in a meaningful kinda way ... :-/

• Germany, 2800, 3.4
• Iceland, 18, 6.3
• Ireland, 1.9, 0.0
• Italy, 700.4, 1.2
• Luxembourg, 3.0, 0.7

You mean you don't have Eircom's wonderful 'High Speed' option - 2x64kB ISDN b-channels?? The pinnacle of modern technology!

(I'd laugh only I'm being gouged by Eircom in paying a premium for their sucky ISDN. And they have the audacity to label it 'high speed'. Geez ....)

My guess is the center got involved in the Information Town thing in Ennis or something similar. I can't imagine it only has a Hi-Speed connection and it certainly doesn't have I-Stream in that part of the country!
All I can say is I'm there! Doolin (and the surrounding area) is absolutely beautiful and a fabulous place to drink copious amounts of beer! Especially when you can find lots of great local (and less local) musicians playing in the pubs every night. If anyone out there would like to go to an LBW aswell as seeing some of the famed Irish hospitality and lifestyle then this is the trip for you! Hope I see you all there!

If you think that Australia has it bad, take a look at how Broadband is doing in Ireland. The prices are like USD100/month for a 512/128 kbit connection with a 3 GIG DL LIMIT!!!!

If you feel sorry for broadband users in Australia, I don't think I have words for what you should feel for broadband users in Ireland.

Just take a look at this page or even this. Basically the company Eircom who is Ireland's primary telecomms company (see my previous post for more of an explanation) intimidated offline a parody website called errorcom.com (not linking as it points elsewhere now). As anyone who had seen it thought it was absolutley brilliant it is now permanently stored online all over the place.

Here in Ireland we have no consumer broadband. If I want to connect to the Internet I can:

1. Dialup at up to 56k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $15 per month line rental
2. ISDN 64k for $0.6 - $2 per hour + $35 per month line rental
3. ISDN 128K for $1.2 - $4 per hour + $35 per month line rental + $25 per month IP connection
4. Leased Line (about $10k per annum for 128k)

So now we have Ireland Offline trying to act as the voice of reason our politically appointed department of Telecommunications Regulations should be, but neither have any real teeth. Just to top it all off, after NTL bought Cablelink (cableTV) the next government sale came up, Telecom Eireann which was floated to the public with guaranteed share availability to each member of the public, and everyone encouraged (banks throwing money at them) to buy at the government set price. So Eircom was launched (of course they had to rebrand it) and proceeded to lose most of the country some of their hard earned cash (but not the country's "vice prime minister" who was/is on the board who claimed at the first agm/lynching after the floatation that "he had no money to buy with" HAHAHA (insider trading cough cough) HAHA). So after a failed floatition that lost most of their customers potential loyalty (most people even had to deal with a share split as the mobile division was sold off, so they ended up with some vodafone shares) the company went through an incredilby public bidding war resulting in the purchase of the fixed line division by a private group which now has a £2billion+ loan to cover .... so they are going to launch a cheaper service for anything .... I think not ... they will unbundle the local loop now (only 1 year after the EU deadline) and risk losing some analogue call revenue ... NO

To anyone in this thread who has complained in any way about price, quality of service or availability of service I suggest you thank your lucky stars you aren't stuck with 56k (I'm actually extremely lucky that I availed of an offer a few years ago to get unlimited free off-peak net access for $25 per month from one of their competitors who no longer allow people to sign up AND who kicked of many users for over using the unlimited service!) and go search google for errorcom to see just how popular eircom are! I think GPRS will be my first "broadband" connection .... Go 2002!!!

Back on 3rd Oct a post was made to the Irish Linux Users Groups Social Mailing list supplying simply the URL errorcom.com. Unfortunatley within about 48 hours the site was gone. A bit of digging discovered that the site was created by a minor and one phonecall to the person whose credit card purchased the domain from Irelands former/still monopolistic telco who it was parodying had the site taken down :-( Now luckily there are lots of people in Ireland who care about the state of our telecommunications industry so mirrors sprang up nearly instantly, but alas the domain is gone. You can see the site at here as it was mirrored right/left and center within minutes of going down, because every Irish telecoms user can see the humour! If you want to see some more of it yourself you may also want to look at Eircom themselves and maybe Irish Director of Telecommunications Regulations.

The key here is that one phonecall which stated the site was "very offensive" and threatened to take further action and this fair satire dissappeared in a puff of smoke. To prove how important this site was, please find the I-Stream which was set to Launch at the Beginning of November (amidst publicity, freephone publicity numbers +3531800512128. Unfortunatley as Eircom knew would happen the ODTR prevented the launch as Eircom had not agreed wholesale prices for the I-Stream Service. As Errorcom carefully informs you, I-Stream is a Eircom brand name for the broadband technology commonly known as Always Delayed Slightly Longer. At the current time the service is still not open for business, and will not be for at least one month after the agreement of wholesale structures by Eircom and the ODTR (so it is back to at least 8th February but more likely 6-12 months time).

It's time lawyers were employed by the courts, this sort of legal posturing and bullying based not on the law but how it can be used is wrong.

Back on 3rd Oct a post was made to the Irish Linux Users Groups Social Mailing list supplying simply the URL errorcom.com. Unfortunatley within about 48 hours the site was gone. A bit of digging discovered that the site was created by a minor and one phonecall to the person whose credit card purchased the domain from Irelands former/still monopolistic telco who it was parodying had the site taken down :-( Now luckily there are lots of people in Ireland who care about the state of our telecommunications industry so mirrors sprang up nearly instantly, but alas the domain is gone. You can see the site at here as it was mirrored right/left and center within minutes of going down, because every Irish telecoms user can see the humour! If you want to see some more of it yourself you may also want to look at Eircom themselves and maybe Irish Director of Telecommunications Regulations.

The key here is that one phonecall which stated the site was "very offensive" and threatened to take further action and this fair satire dissappeared in a puff of smoke. To prove how important this site was, please find the I-Stream which was set to Launch at the Beginning of November (amidst publicity, freephone publicity numbers +3531800512128. Unfortunatley as Eircom knew would happen the ODTR prevented the launch as Eircom had not agreed wholesale prices for the I-Stream Service. As Errorcom carefully informs you, I-Stream is a Eircom brand name for the broadband technology commonly known as Always Delayed Slightly Longer. At the current time the service is still not open for business, and will not be for at least one month after the agreement of wholesale structures by Eircom and the ODTR (so it is back to at least 8th February but more likely 6-12 months time).

It's time lawyers were employed by the courts, this sort of legal posturing and bullying based not on the law but how it can be used is wrong.

As far as I can make out, most European countries have at least one wireless network run by the "state" company or an offshoot of it (in actual fact, many of the "state" telcos have now been privatised), and several other networks run by private competitors.

The relative homogeneity of wireless networks in Europe (almost entirely GSM900 and GSM1800) has a lot to do with State regulation; basically, although the providers are private companies, the authorities in each country (and, probably, the European Union) stipulated in advance that These Shall Be The Standards. It's left us with a market which doesn't seem significantly less competitive than that prevailing in the USA (standards don't discourage innovation or competition, as we should know :), but which is nonetheless highly capable and flexible.

Regarding call costs of mobile versus land-line; the biggest difference between the European situation and what seems to be the prevailing standard in the USA is that here, it does not cost anything to receive a call (unless you're roaming to another network from your "home" network). Calls are pretty cheap - of the order of EUR0.02 to EUR0.30 per minute, depending on how much you pay in advance.

A concrete example: my landline (from eircom costs approximately EUR18 per month for the "line rental", and local calls cost EUR0.01 per minute off-peak, EUR0.05 per minute during business hours. Non-local calls cost the same off-peak, and EUR0.20 per minute peak. My cellphone (from Eircell) costs EUR30 per month, which includes 50 minutes of calls to anywhere in the country - subsequent calls cost between EUR0.15 and EUR0.46 per minute, depending on the time.

Overall, I find that I pay slightly more for my cellphone than for my landline, but I definitely use it a lot more.