It continues to amaze me how many Soho Solo members still don’t have access to broadband. A connection offers several benefits to business enterprises including time savings, an “always on” connection to the Internet and freed up telephone lines. Broadband facilitates greater information flow and communication within the organization as well as with clients and suppliers. I’ve only recently been connected at home in West Cork and I’m overjoyed at the speed (and that’s only 1mb) compared to the old dial up. How anyone running a small to medium sized business in a rural area copes without it beats me. Calvin Jones wrote an great post on this subject on his Writing For Life site recently.
And then there are those who do have access and are paying through the nose for it. Apparantly Ireland has the 9th most expensive broadband! I read an interesting post from Sean McNamara recently where he links to an article which compares broadband statistics world wide.
3 Comments
September 6, 2007 at 11:18 am
Hi Kathleen,
Thanks for the mention!
The broadband issue really is becoming a bit of a joke at this stage. I had our local fixed wireless operator around again yesterday hunting for a signal… but to no avail. They said that I’m in one of the only black spots in the whole of West Cork now… lucky me!
I can get a 1Mbit/second connection with Vodafone’s mobile broadband… but only in the kids playhouse in the garden (I know, it’s bizarre) — on the rest of the property, including my home office, I can only get dialup speeds out of it. Talk about frustrating!
My only hope now is that eircom will get their act together and enable the local exchange in Leap (it’s “on the list” for upgrade before the end of ‘07, apparently). Still, at 6km from the exchange, I may be out of luck there too!
Oh well… guess I’ll have to struggle on with the clunky and expensive ISDN for now.
September 10, 2007 at 10:40 am
Well if all else fails, I’d say the kid’s playhouse might be turning into your office by the end of the year! I’m sure that would go down well!
September 11, 2007 at 8:34 am
Spot on… it would be a nightmare!
In terms of boosting productivity access to broadband comes in a very distant second to keeping the kids happily engaged. The playhouse will remain a playhouse for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, the Vodafone modem has gone back to the shop… and my quest for broadband continues.