After two dismal reports on high-speed access in the Republic, experts are urging expanded availability to drive demand, writes Karlin Lillington

Will we never catch up on the broadband front? Perhaps no other national technological issue has caused more frustration to so many, or continued to perplex quite as much.

With two reports out in the past week showing that the Republic remains at the bottom of most internet league tables, it's beginning to look like either a miracle or some very deep pockets and Government vision will be needed to put the country back on track.

Because it contains so many cross-country comparisons, Forfás's Benchmarking Ireland's Broadband Performance report is particularly damning. Take a look at the bar charts in the report, and there's Ireland, always at the small end of a steep incline of countries evaluated.

The report clearly illustrates that both business and consumer take-up is scant in comparison to most of the developed world. For example, Ireland is ranked 25th out of the 32 countries for broadband take-up, well behind nations like Estonia, Luxembourg and Slovenia, and with a pathetic 20 per cent of the figure in Denmark or the Netherlands for fast internet connections.

And far from showing a bit of improvement, when the group is limited to the 21 countries benchmarked in Forfás's 2004 study, Ireland's position has actually deteriorated, from 18th in 2004 to 19th in 2005.

The report also highlights the low broadband take-up by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Of 20 EU countries included, Ireland ranks 17th for take-up by companies with a workforce of between 10-49 and 19th for take-up by companies employing 50-249 people.

And, despite significant improvements in DSL (digital subscriber line) availability in Ireland since 2002, DSL coverage here stands at 72 per cent of the population, making it the second lowest of the EU-15 countries.

"Essentially, we were late starters at the broadband and though we're now building up momentum, everyone else is building up momentum too," says Martin Cronin, chief executive of Forfás.

That late start, industry observers say, was the result of an oddly Irish set of circumstances and coincidences that, in the long term, has proven crippling. The privatisation of Eircom - though inevitable - made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Government to force the dominant operator to open up lines to competition.

Nor could Eircom be pushed to offer particular types of services - such as low-cost, flat-rate, dial-up internet access - early on, a product that in other markets like the US and Britain proved to be the ignition point for massive internet growth.

Court battles, as the main operators challenged regulatory decisions, delayed market growth, as did the rapid buying and selling of a whole slew of Irish telecom operators such as Ocean and Esat, which nullified some of the public service provision requirements that the Government had tied to purchases of fibre connectivity.

Campaign group Ireland Offline has long argued that the failure to open up the last mile of phone line to homes and business to competition - known as local loop unbundling, or LLU - has badly damaged the market, a stance that has been echoed by the communications regulator ComReg and is highlighted in the Forfás report.

The result has been years of being an odd anomaly in the international technology picture - a country at the forefront when it comes to the presence of technology companies in the economy, where they have greatly contributed to the Celtic Tiger, but a country extremely weak in ability to provide its business and general community with ICT amenities or stimulate their use.

The second report published in the past week, from the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland (CCI), underlines just how frustrating Irish businesses find the current broadband situation.

Though the Forfás report has some good news - cost of DSL, the most common broadband access method, has declined consistently since first introduced in 2002, and usage is growing, especially in the fixed wireless sector, with a threefold expansion in users - the CCI survey of 601 members notes that one-third of businesses could not get the connectivity they wanted.

Usually, this was a case of the relevant services not being available at all in an area, which is a major problem outside of Dublin, says CCI head of research, Seán Murphy. In some cases, services are not available at all and, in general, broadband take-up is surprisingly low among companies.

Only 29 per cent have broadband, with another third still using dial-up. Here the regional divide is apparent: two-thirds of Dublin companies have broadband, while only just above 40 per cent have it in the midland and border regions.

Murphy says the oft-cited fact that Irish leased lines are among the cheapest in the world is irrelevant. Most businesses, especially SMEs, should be able to get the services they need through inexpensive and comprehensive broadband services, not through more expensive leased lines.

The Forfás report indicates why broadband take-up might be generally poor. Its broadband innovation index, used to measure quality of service performance across the benchmark countries, ranks Ireland 21st out of 30 countries. The index indicates poor value for money for businesses, which tend to use advanced-level broadband products.

So what needs to be done? Both Forfás and CCI are similar in their conclusions and call for action. "We need to improve availability, and international experience says that is done by expanding competition," says Cronin, again pointing to the need for rapid unbundling of the local loop.

Despite a rash of new broadband providers in the market in the past year in particular, lack of LLU places limits on how far they can discount prices and the services they will offer.

Both Murphy and Cronin think the government's Metropolitan Area Networks (Mans) and expanding community schemes will help too, but Murphy says that there is still a lack of clarity and vision regarding how the Mans will be used and who will control access to them.

Both reports indicate the need to drive demand for broadband by the provision of services - where Government can play a major role - and raising the penetration of PCs, which is still among the lowest of any European population, perhaps through tax subsidies.

Murphy also notes that one in four home PCs in Ireland are so old that they cannot handle broadband.

Murphy would like to see more cable competition as well, as the battle for market share between the cable and telecoms companies largely drove broadband adoption in the US. He says that the arrival of Liberty on the scene here should help the cable broadband situation.

Do Murphy and Cronin think things are going to change much in the coming year? Cronin hopes so, and is asking businesses and consumers for submissions of ideas on how to accelerate change.

Says Murphy: "Really, the next year is going to be very, very important to letting us break out of the plateau we're on. If we want to brand ourselves as a four-star economy, we have to solve this."