Yep, TheRegister has confirmed what I already knew. The Irish are being taken to the cleaners for broadband. See their article here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/21/ireland_broadband/.
I was home for a month last summer and has DSL installed from eircom. I couldn't believe the prices for DSL. They still had bandwidth limits on DSL connections like 4GB download and 1GB upload per month! The charges when you exceeded these limits were something like 40 euro per GB (3.6 cents/MB). 4GB is nothing. I was syncing my Lotus Notes using it, downloading WebSphere source code builds etc, I ended up using a remote machine in the lab to avoid the charges. Ridiculous. I saw similar pricing schemes in Germany in 97/98 but these kind of pricing systems in 2005 is just silly.
Not just Ireland. I live in South Africa and my 384 kb connection with a 3GB cap costs me approximately 100 euro per month. This is from our one and only ADSL service provider(formerly a state company, now a listed company in a regulated industry! - Guaranteed no competition.)
Wireless broadband and 3G technology has just been introduced but the prices are even higher.
Thanks to Websphere and Java I can just about afford these prices, but the costs are really hampering growth and development in this digital age we live in.
Posted by: Andre Roodt | March 23, 2005 at 10:06 PM