[ILUG] ireland offline 'strike'

[Chris Higgins]

> <daydream>
> When the arse fell out of the Eircom shares it would have been cool if the
> government had bought back the local loop. Eircom would have been just
> another operator renting cabinets. The govt could have used some of that
> infrastructure grant money (the millions that were going to go into private
> projects that have now been shelved) to bring real connectivity to consumers
> instead of yet another stretch of fibre that we'll never see either end of.
> </daydream>

Erm, Isn't the infrastructure being run by a state owned company what
got us into this problem in the first place ? 

Unless there are clear incentives for the people involved to make it
profitable - they won't... In the case of the current local loop ,
dropping prices make it financially beneficial to maintain the status quo.

In the case of Eircom - aDSL is a death knell to their current pricing model,
and it's also a death knell for the pricing models of all the ISPs in the
market.

The sooner it rolls out, the quicker you see ISPs go under as they realise
that they got their business plans all wrong and have little or no
investor funding to cover the gap  :)

Look at the Esatclear flatrate offerings - dead because the spreadsheet went 
red... Ireland.com free email service (never could see why a newspaper should
have an email service).. Buyandsell.net (get your free shares..)... and
countless other ventures that didn't have a viable business model or 
made just one assumption too many when predicting service takeup/rollout/
viability/real cost.

This whole .com shakeout is eliminating the companies that cannot make money
from their business models.. that means two things for us.

a/ We get charged for services (and as most of the companies involved have
   traditional business models, we don't get the benefits of lean technology
   enabled businesses)
b/ The 'free service' model is dying, and base line service costs are going
   up. (We're not seeing the charges go up, because most of the traditional
   businesses are looking at 80% gross margin on services).
   As soon as the base line service costs climb far enough, we'll see the
   service prices climb too.

So, dig in - hold onto whatever free services you have, but make sure
that you don't live by them - keep your data local and safe... you never
know when Xdrive or ireland.com or oceanfree.net or who-ever your favourite
free service will disappear without warning... 

> 
> Fergal
> 
-- 
-- 
** Chris Higgins                         e: chris.higgins at horizon.ie **
** Technical Business Development        tel: +353-1-6204916            **
** Horizon Technology Group              fax: +353-1-6204949            **
** CCSI# 23364                                                          **