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It seems like paradise compared to here in the Irish Republic.
We also have our former state monopoly(eircom) that still has that air of bureaucracy hanging stale in the air. I'm a telecoms engineer myself and have been fighting for 6 years to see some semblance of DSL enter my area. I have currently resigned to paying 3700($5000!) a month for a T1(that's 95% of my wages by the way). It all started when I tried to get someone to install a phoneline in my newly built home(CAT6 in the walls and all). What followed was a 3 month debacle during which I pleaded, begged, offered to install the line myself, buy the exchange, borrow, steal, maim and kill my way to a basic POTS line. I broke into tears several times(for the first time in years). Eventually I lost my temper and screamed obsenities down the line. 15 minutes later an eircom van arrives complete with an engineer who finaly connects my line.

Whooo... now I can get DSL!....cant I?...whaddya mean 'what's DST?'...oh god

No cable, no DSL, nothing. Fast forward 4 years...DSL arrives in select areas of Dublin due to government pressure. Still no DSL in my area I plump for a T1 out of necessity.

2 Years later: DSL arrives by surprise in our town! A group of tech-aware people in the town collective stop gnawing their nails.
We make a call to a nice eircom lady who explained to us that it had only been announced that broadband was available in the town, it wasent actually available to customers, but it was planned "sometime within the next 3 years". Cue appearance of clumps of hair littering the streets.

And I still can't get DSL!

BTW: see http://www.irelandoffline.com/ http://www.eircomtribunal.com/

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.

There may be a significant difference between 'users on-line' and the amount of surfing individuals. Thanks to our punitive telco here in Ireland, I'm severly limited as to my on-line time as our dialup charges are metered per-minute. *And* we've yet to get decent broadband! There may be more users on-line per-capita (I doubt that, too) but they're not on-line as long & thus not hitting as many URLs. Long-winded, but do you see my point?

Consider yourselves lucky, guys. Here in Ireland we're still struggling with ISDN as being the 'broadband' solution, both for home and business users. And this is almost entirely down to the national telco (eircom) delaying and delaying on the rollout of (A)DSL. It really sux. I'm typing this over ISDN using both B channels. It costs me the price of a local call ($.05) X 2 every THREE MINUTES. And all for a massive 128K bandwidth! Whoopee!! 8-b

[grumble, growl]

For more details on Ireland's Broadband issues, check out Ireland Off-Line

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.

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.

Some 2,000 Irish dialup users of Esat Fusion's "No Limits" ISP service (unmetered evening and off-peak access) get cut off next week for "abusing the spirit of the service" by remaining connected for hours at a time (what was that service called? O yes, "No Limits" :-).

This has spawned a new campaign, Ireland OffLine, pressing for better connectivity, flat rates, and -- yes -- DSL :-)

///Peter