Republic bottom in telecom poll

The Republic has come in at the bottom of a European telecommunications scorecard that criticises the slow pace at which incumbent telecommunications companies have opened their phone lines to competitors.

The European Competitive Telecommunications Association says that the unbundling of local loops has been "a failure".

Unbundling refers to the requirement that incumbents give competitors access to the "last mile" of local phone lines that run directly from local exchanges into homes and businesses.

According to a scorecard published by the association with analyst Cullen International, only 0.01 per cent of European lines have been unbundled in the year following the enactment of an EU law that requires unbundling.

Among its findings, the scorecard reveals that only 2 per cent of European phone lines have been converted to DSL (digital subscriber line), a technology that enables high-speed internet access across ordinary copper phone wire.

New entrants operate only 3 per cent of these lines over unbundled loops, leaving incumbents with 97 per cent of the DSL market.

According to the association, more than 50 per cent of new lines in the DSL market are operated by incumbents.

The scorecard places the Republic at the bottom of the league in nearly every one of more than a dozen categories, alongside Greece.

The State has no commercially available DSL lines, no fully unbundled lines, and only one partially unbundled line, purchased by Esat in a Limerick exchange.

While the Republic is listed as having more cable internet broadband connections than Greece - 52,000 as opposed to 10,000 - industry insiders say this is not a correct comparison.

The Irish figure is for the number of homes that could theoretically be serviced by a cable modem, while in all other cases, the figures refer to the actual number of homes with cable modem connections.

A more realistic Irish number would be closer to a few thousand connections at most, and the majority of these are provided by a small cable operator in Dungarvan.

The full report is at www.ectaportal.com/html/index.php.