[ILUG] [OT] Couple of interesting stories in de paper

[adam beecher]

[From the Irish Examiner's (yuk!) Connect supplement.]

Loop Delay
ESAT could offer fast ADSL access this summer if it had access to Ireland's
full telecommunications network, the company has claimed. The telecoms
regulator recently announced that full unbundling of the local loop, which
would permit such access, would not take place until April 2001. The local
loop is the last section of cable which runs into users' homes, and had been
owned by Eircom. Eircom must now allow other companies access to this cable
by the April 2001 date. Other telecoms companies have said that this is not
fast enough. Esat owner British Telecommunications has been trialling ADSL
services for some time in the UK and announced on Wednesday that the service
will be commercially available in July. BT's service will go live in the UK
in July. The service is priced at STG£39.99, with STG£150 set up fee.

Also, there was a panel on page 3 (snigger) about BOI's announcement of the
"launch" of Clikpay - which I think will be their third launch so far, not
including the "special offers". On browsing the Clikpay website
<http://www.boi.ie/clikpay> however, I notice that absolutely no changes
have been made to the system - it still requires IIS 4.0 on NT 4.0. Neither
are there any announcements about the launch on the parent site.

Another story of interest is that the UK recruitment website StepStone has
purchased jobfinder.ie for £3.9m and 1.37m ordinary shares in StepStone.
There are quite a few other articles of interest too. As usual, de paper
gets a lot of it quite, quite wrong, but worth a read nonetheless.

adam

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