Copacetic

According to the latest COMREG report there are 1.1m 697,700 broadband users in Ireland (pg 20) out of a total irish population of 4m.

Fantastically entertaining punch up about broadband take up, cost etc. over on Karlin’s blog. You need to delve into the comments. All the great and good of the Irish blogging scene are represented and many others besides.

Pull up a chair and watch the sparks fly!

More good juice over on Damien’s blog as well.

We moved house recently and this prompted me to investigate an alternative to my existing broadband supplier (Eircom). I rang NTL last week had a pleasant conversation with with an Irish sales guy who gently persuaded me to ugrade to NTL digital to boot (ok, I was kind of planning to at some point so he caught me in a softened up state).

The NTL man arrived on Tuesday and with a bit of tinkering on my part I had broadband connected all over the house  via wireless by 6.00pm. Its the standard package  (3mb download, €30 a month) and according to the Irish ISPtest its about the same speed as my €45 a month Eircom package.

Two nice touches,

• They texted me to remind me that the guy was coming the day before he was due to arrive.
• I had a problem when I first connected so I followed the instructions taped to the top of the cable modem (power off PC, power off modem, turn on modem wait 30 secs, turn on PC) for a laugh, and hey presto it worked!

Good job NTL…

The Radisson Hotel at Little Island in Cork has free WIFI and broadband access available for all guests and visitors. Cool!

• Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing
• Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
• Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
• Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
• Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
• Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
• Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
• Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
• Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
• Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales
• Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
• Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
• Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
• Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
• Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

I took a lot of notes at the recent Web 2.0 conference and transcribed them from my own awful handwriting. I had great plans to write it up properly but work and buggy software conspired against me. So if you can stomach my disjointed and staccato note style you should browse over to Enterprise Ireland Web 2.0 : Conference Notes for my transcribed notes. All errors and omissions are mine and apologies to any of the speakers I misquoted.
Reminder of the speakers,

• Judy Gibbons, lately of Accel Partners, a tier 1 silicon valley VC, previously head of MSN at Microsoft.
• Marc Canter, CEO of BroadbandMechanics and founder of MacroMedia.
• Adam Green, founder of Andover.net.
• Jeff Clavier, founder and partner at Softtech Ventures.
• Daniel Waters, sector partner at 3i.
• Nasser Batley, VP at Dresdner Kleinwort Wassterstein in charge of M&A activity in the media and Internet markets.

Michele exposes the IEDR in a excellent post. I register domain names pretty regularily (well once every six months or so). On GoDaddy I can whip up a name in next to no time, no questions asked. But for our IEDR no amount of bogosity is a bridge too far.

Their attempts to police the Internet for Ireland have meant that I only ever register a .ie domain when there is absolutely no other alternative (and there is usually an alternative).

The IEDR policy is a classic example of optimising the process to handle the exceptions rather than the common case. So everybody has to jump through the same mind numbing justification process to register names that in any other jurisidiction would be a click away.

How many Irish specific services have .com names just because its cheaper and easier to do it that way?

Blacknight provide an Irish ISP speed test for broadband users. Its pretty good in terms of user interface (requires Java as it’s an applet).
What I’d really like to see (and blacknight may provide this, I just haven’t found it yet) is a comparison across vendors and exchanges so that you can see how fast you are at home and in work and also compare your speed with neighbours, friends, colleagues etc. Then we could really see how the different broadband vendors compare in the trenches as opposed to on the marketing brochures.