Subject: Re: Telecoms and Broadband in Ireland - What Should Be Done ? / National Broadband Scheme Tue Jul 08, 2008 1:05 am
What's the story with the broadband plans anyone? I see it on RTE's website that there is some noise from the dept of communications and the marine and Eamon Ryan about a 'Ten-point plan' .. http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0703/broadband1.html
Damien Mulley is interviewed by RTE - why doesn't Eamo give him a role as a consultant if he doesn't have a job already?
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Subject: Re: Telecoms and Broadband in Ireland - What Should Be Done ? / National Broadband Scheme Tue Jul 08, 2008 1:47 am
Some critics have been saying that the funding that's been announced is funding that was already allocated. (I can't remember who exactly but there is a slight possibility that it might have been Adrian Weckler from the Sunday Business Post speaking on Matt Cooper's Last Word) The story about Eamon Ryan's ten point plan was leaked in the Irish Times about 2 weeks before the actual announcement, which made me start to wonder.... Maybe the minister knew there wouldn't be the funding there and didn't want to make any announcement, then someone in the department leaked the plans to the newspaper so he was left with no choice but to announce the plans.....? Maybe I've been watching too much Yes Minister.
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Subject: Re: Telecoms and Broadband in Ireland - What Should Be Done ? / National Broadband Scheme Mon Aug 25, 2008 11:31 am
Is the biggest issue with broadband here that nearly ALL our telecomms infrastructure is in the possession of an AUSTRALIAN investment bank and a greedy employees union which have no interest in upgrading it because the return might be lower than the investment for one thing? Maybe they're waiting for something ...
There's an Eircom/Babcock & Brown/Babcock & Brown Capital Management watch going on over on the Pin since this time 2007 by 2Pack. He's keeping a close eye on it fair play and as far as I understand it the summary of the thread might be like this:
2Pack, Friday, 23rd August 2007 wrote:
OK Potted History.
The 2 largest heavy leverage operations in Australia are Macquarie and Babcock and Brown. They borrow in murky ways to get the fund to take over their targets and they then leve lots of bonds lying around in mysterious hedge funds.
Babcock have a subsidiary called BCM which owns eircom . It has no other asset .
Today it fell 3% in an otherwise stable market as you can see
Something murky will soon be revealed there I feel !!
2Pack, Thursday August 16th, 2007 wrote:
Hopefully in receivership so that the state can buy network/wholesale back cheaply and feck retail and the verminous staff who leveraged it with debt over the years to line their own pockets
A lean efficient eircom wholesale with no more than 3000 staff would be good for the country if in public hands
We can start our reducing line rental to the EU average straight away and roll out BB everywhere....if we can offload the €4.2bn debt as a day to day issue.
2Pack, Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 wrote:
I am not a bit surprised the Eircom Chairman Pierre Danon just fled rapidly when he read this document linked below. Danon could not in good conscience stand over these blatant lies and misrepresentations to the Australian Stock Exchange .
Babcock and Brown sure told a lot of LIES to the Australian stock exchange on page 21 of this recent valuation of eircom re: Broadband.
89% of lines 'connected' counts a primary rate as 30 lines , it is not, it is one for broadband purposes . 882000 Broadband connections in 2007 includes 100000 3G mobile users who
a) are not actually broadband at ALL by the international OECD definition. b) are with Vodafone or O2 or Hutchison 3 and not with eircom.
PAGE 58 of that PDF states that in reference to an asset table on page 57
1. Eircom has €2.4Bn of Goodwill 2. Eircom has €301m of Trademarks 3. Eircom has €264m worth of 'Relationships'
This lot make up €3bn which is posted to the eircom balance sheet and 'accounts'( to use the phrase advisedly) for about half their assets .
This is lunacy ...or fraud . eircom has if anything -€2.4bn worth of goodwill becuase everybody hates the loathsome slimebags .
Talk about subprime valuations being unrealistics.
They are completely fucked from what I can see if that goodwill and intangibles is the only thing that keeps them within their loan covenants .
Babcock 'increased' their goodwill from €1.5bn to €2.4bn when they bought them !
Green Bear, Sunday 17th August, 2008 wrote:
Quote :
Babcock & Brown Capital, the owners of Eircom, considered reducing the telco's large €3.7bn debt pile but decided it would not be "efficient'' or an "effective use'' of cash, instead opting to buy back shares. Meanwhile Babcock & Brown Capital executives are reviewing the company's future and whether to cut all links with Babcock and Brown, the Australian firm which originally set it up.
The Sunday Tribune understands that Babcock & Brown Capital and Eircom executives are concerned that a major slump in the shares of Babcock & Brown back in Australia is having a "drag'' effect on Babock & Brown Capital, which owns Eircom. It is also listed in Australia. >>>>>
Hmm, I smell a rat, Mr. Fawlty. I smell B&B Capital being spun off with a huge debt pile that it can then default on without affected the parent company. This is being spun as B&B Capital cutting links with the parent, but I believe the reality is the opposite.
yoganmahew , Sunday 17th August wrote:
ray wrote:
mr_anderson wrote:
I still think it would be great if the government bought it back for a fraction of what it sold it for. All they would really have to do is keep it going for another few years, wait until sentiment turns up again, then flog it back to the market at an overinflated price once more.
Is that a possibility, would any buyout not have to assume the debt that is piled on Eircom.
Not if, as 2Pack and I suspect, it is being set up to go bust with a mountain of debt. It is classic LBO method - Buy something with debt, squeeze it for all its worth for the next few years inflating its profits, pile on more debt that is taken out of the company into the LBO parent, spin it off as a going concern with its mountain of debt, watch it fall at the first slow-down, then buy the assets again for pennies on the pound. Rinse and repeat.
It seems this genius believes that 3 years ago, ireland was ahead of other advanced countries.
To be honest, with digital exchanges already in place and with the metro area networks and the national fibre-optic network, the country was in good shape a few years ago.
No it wasn't - the top end internet services in ireland were and still are a joke compared to other countries.
The one and only time ireland was in good shape was after the digitization in the early 80's - the network isn't much better today than it was after that, and a handful of 2.5Gbit fibre rings isn't really going to cut it - funnily enough the swedes are currently decommissioning higher capacity lines inside cities than ireland is putting in nationally.
Check this out (especially the date) - it's no surprise that skype came from sweden, not ireland.
2Pack, Saturday 23rd August wrote:
bearishbull wrote:
Irish Gov should buy Eircom at a cheap price
I don't know if you noticed but eircom is worthless. It has debts of €4.2bn that it cannot service beyond about 2011 when it needs to refinance these debts at much much higher interest rates than at present. Its a dead man walking .
Getting it for €4.2bn involves taking on this debt, fuck that for a completely stupid idea. You also take on the parasitic union shitbags that voted for this exorbitant debt so they could pay tehmselves brown envelopes of cash .
These 'concerned' Comreg people should be the first quango to the wall in this country . They were the first sectoral regulator ever set up here and are a manifest failure.
They continue to set increasingly lower standards for other sectoral regulators to follow . Comreg should have forced eircom to invest not to bleed the company dry . They did not do so and deserve to die along with eircom or even just before them.
Comreg have a primary function was is deliver quality services at internationally comparable prices and at service levels commensurate with ( sit down before you read the next bit) ..a knowledge economy in the first world. Instead we have '3 Broadband' and Comreg let them away with it .
As for eircom , wait until well after it collapses under its debt before you make any move. It is a going concern in cash terms but not in any other terms .
With Comreg around eircom will cost too much. Abolishing Comreg in a timely manner would probably tip eircom over the edge for the simple reason that their replacement would not want to be abolished too and may be competent as a result .
The only circumstances under which I would consider swooping for eircom is at about 25c in the euro and with the greedy unions who voted 100% for this €4.2bn debt out of the ownership loop permanently and with pay cuts and 5 year no strike deals to wit .
Otherwise let it collapse and sack the lot of them . Then rehire a few useful ones perhaps , not too many mind .
Thank feck for mobile phones
Indeed. The sad and continuing tale of B&B and Eircom ...
Subject: Re: Telecoms and Broadband in Ireland - What Should Be Done ? / National Broadband Scheme Wed Aug 27, 2008 9:27 pm
Is Eircom for sale for the fifth time since privatisation less than 10 years ago? The meltdown of its current owner, Australian investment house Babcock Brown, means that Eircom, along with other saleable assets held by the Australian firm, is now in effect on the market. The Irish Times says "No value has been put on Eircom as yet but it doesn't look like an attractive proposition with its large debts and an aging network in a slowing economy"
Babcock and Brown is not a Telecoms group but a debt financed operation that lost 34% of its value last week and is assumed non-viable. Babcock and Brown still doesn't consider its 57% stake in Eircom as of any great importance. Eircom is assumed to have lost value due to the economic recession in Ireland.
The privatisation of Eircom has been an unmitigated disaster. Eircom has kept its grip on the copper network and has kept a stranglehold on the development of alternatives and in particular broadband. Instead of selling Eircom, we could have kept it and invested in provision of a high quality broadband network across the country. Its buyers have marked it up and sold it on without investing.
Time to re-nationalise?
This is what imo we should be doing:
Quote :
Shannon Development Chief Executive, Kevin Thompstone, has called for the urgent rollout of a €4 billion high-speed broadband telecommunications infrastructure, across Ireland.
Speaking at the announcement of the Company’s 2007 end of year results on Tuesday, Thompstone said, “To be truly competitive in the knowledge economy, Ireland urgently needs to have ultra high speed broadband available in every part of the country. Clients from major international corporations will not wait a few years for the private sector to provide what is a vital piece of public communications infrastructure, they will simply vote with their feet and invest elsewhere.”
“While economic growth in Ireland is still high, in comparison to many of our European counterparts, we need to ensure that we are battle fit to meet the growing pressures of globalisation. One initiative which offers Ireland an opportunity to both catch up with and leap ahead of other parts of the world in relation to pervasive broadband access is the development of a national Next Generation Network (NGN). One of the key elements of NGN is that broadband is delivered not just to a town via a fibre ring but direct to enterprise and the home by means of fibre to the door.
Subject: Re: Telecoms and Broadband in Ireland - What Should Be Done ? / National Broadband Scheme Wed Aug 27, 2008 10:30 pm
There are already some Metropolitan Area Networks around, which is a fiber circuit in and around our major urban areas but they aren't being connected to the home yet, far as I know. The cost of these was half a billion already and I'd like to find out more about these actually.
Could be if we rolled out some more that the value of Eircom would drop even more because of the saturation of broadband and I've little doubt it should be driven down in price and renationalised.
Lads it's a total fecking mess. Our comms infrastructure is owned by an Australian (mate) investment bank and our regulator is as useful as, to quote rockofcashel, an ashtray on a motorbike. The high court supported Eircom recently when ComReg wanted them reduce the wholesale charge from €8 to €3. The law getting involved in a national regulator of a small country's infrastructure which is owned by a company half way around the globe ... that's fucking Irish.
The consumer is caught in the middle. The only competition I can really hope for is with mobile broadband ... I'm convinced that we should have proper 3Meg download speeds now for half the price not paying another fiver a month like Eircom are asking now. There's no choice - it's a pure, unadulterated mess.
And we haven't even gotten on to talking about what shite that broadband will deliver yet either which is the most important part - but as 2Pack from the Pin above says, it's no wonder Skype emerged in Sweden, not Ireland.
Here's the Irish Times ComReg report, for some reason their webpage is eating up all my 100kb bandwidth
Babcock Brown signals end of role in Eircom ARTHUR BEESLEY Senior Business Correspondent
BABCOCK BROWN'S stewardship of Eircom is set to end in the coming months after the troubled Australian investment bank said it was reviewing its management arrangement with the listed satellite fund that has direct ownership of Eircom.
The termination of the bank's management arrangement with the Babcock Brown Capital (BCM) fund could lead to a sale of Eircom, according to sources close to the company. However, the financier who orchestrated the Australian takeover of Eircom only two years ago insisted yesterday that the company is not for sale at the moment.
.....
In a statement yesterday, BCM said it hoped to conclude discussions on "any internalisation of management" in time for its annual meeting in November.
However, any termination of the arrangement would be subject to BCM and the bank reaching agreement on a compensation package for the loss of management fee income from a contract that has 23 years to run. "Given that they earn substantial management fees, they're unlikely to give it up for free," Mr Topfer said.
BCM paid Aus$34 million (€19.93 million) in management fees to the bank last year, a sum calculated according to the value of the fund's net tangible assets.
The poor performance of the fund's share price, which lost 6.6 per cent yesterday and currently implies a market capitalisation on the business of only Aus$505.43 million (€296.1 million), meant that further share-based fees were not payable.
Eircom, whose debt amounts to some €3.46 billion, yesterday reported an 8 per cent rise to €698 million in earnings before interest tax depreciation amortisation and one-off items.
Mr Topfer said BCM continued to enjoy good relations with the Eircom employee share ownership trust, which owns 35 per cent of the telco, but acknowledged that Babcock Brown's troubles were unhelpful. "Are they happy to have the noise that surrounds Babcock Brown, my guess is that the answer to that is no."
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Subject: Re: Telecoms and Broadband in Ireland - What Should Be Done ? / National Broadband Scheme Thu Jan 22, 2009 10:58 pm
Still 10% of Ireland without Broadband coverage or was it 30% I heard on the Six One news ? Haven't got the technical details of this yet but Eamon Ryan today announced the "National Broadband Scheme" which was criticised by FG as being low quality. And about the extent of which Damien Mulley was dubious.
Is it a wireless service through "3" ? I imagine it will be part wired but a bigger part will be via mobile phone-like technology and masts. Or perhaps it will be a change in some exchanges or have they all been unbundled ?
Johnny Murphy just outside Maam Cross or somewhere in the middle of nowhere would still have a phone line - why that can't be used I'm not sure - speed of exchanges or what ? Maybe the contention ratio would be so low that Johnny would have a whole line to himself ! i.e. 200mb broadband !
Minister Ryan's youtube feature gives no meaty technical detail ..
Portal 
Goodwill 
