Wireless Wonderland For Irish Business

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or are a total technophobe, the importance of broadband to your business, from the point of view of using the internet to sell goods, provide information to customers and spot market opportunities, cannot have gone unnoticed.

The problem, however, for Ireland is twofold. In the first instance, not all firms that are aware of the power of online communications have been adequately served with internet services, and those that want high-speed service often cannot get it for reasons of geography.

Secondly, even amongst businesses in areas where broadband is available, more owner managers need to be aware of the power of the internet to demand higher-quality services. They also need to realise an internet presence is not a brochure, but a living, breathing representation of their company to the world.

The problem of access has been a thorn in the side of the Irish economy for many years now, but with the march of technology new options now exist to allow firms to get broadband wherever they are located and at affordable prices.

The last quarter of 2009 has been dominated by various players keen to use Ireland’s abundance of wireless spectrum to roll out new services.

One of these new services is a technology called WiMax, which aims to give Wi-Fi-like broadband speeds over a wide geographic area. Ireland’s first WiMax operator Imagine – bolstered by a US$100m investment by Intel and Motorola – is offering quality WiMax broadband and phone packages from just €25 a month. The WiMax network will also give laptop/PC users at home and on the move access to a mobile-broadband dongle, available from €5 per month.

Imagine has begun its commercial rollout of WiMax in selected areas in and around Dublin. The first phase of the rollout is covering 250,000 homes in Dublin, Wexford and Sligo and will be completed by mid-December 2009.

“The new network will not be restricted to high-population areas, but will also be rolled out to smaller towns and rural communities at a rate of 15 new WiMax areas per month. This is great news for Irish customers who are currently paying €25.47 every month to rent a basic line from Eircom,” says Imagine’s CEO Sean Bolger.

Bolger’s Imagine Group bought Irish Broadband last year for €47m. Ireland’s first WiMax service relies on the 3.5GHz spectrum.

Each WiMax base station would give Wi-Fi-like coverage of 8Mbps up to 40Mbps and higher over distances of 1.5km in urban areas and 9km in rural areas.

Brian O’Donohoe, managing director of Imagine, explains that ComReg has granted the company more than 90MHz worth of 3.5MHz spectrum licences, which will allow it to cover much of the country. Imagine plans to use its WiMax service alongside NTR’s nationwide fibre network.

“We aim to provide high-quality broadband to people who are fed up getting bad DSL or who are tired of using 3G dongles for home broadband. We are also looking at opening the service up as a wholesale offering to other telecoms firms that want to sell broadband,” he added.

The move to WiMax will be given added impetus in the coming two years when Intel begins manufacturing PCs with WiMax chips inside, hoping to score a similar coup with WiMax as its Centrino chip did with Wi-Fi.

3G broadband

While WiMax may be capturing the headlines, the importance of 3G broadband cannot be underestimated. If not for 3G broadband services from companies such as Vodafone, O2, Meteor and 3, Ireland would not have achieved the 1.3 million broadband subscribers it has today.

In fact, 3G broadband is seen as a vital cog in helping Ireland reach 100pc broadband coverage. Earlier this year the Government revealed the National Broadband Scheme (NBS), which sees an estimated €223m investment by 3, of which a maximum of €79.8m will be contributed by the Irish Government and the EU, to provide broadband services to the designated electoral districts covered by the scheme.

Another facet of the NBS is the use of satellite technologies to ensure access in rural areas to support local businesses and homes.

Based on this, Mullingar-headquartered Satellite Broadband Ireland is to create 30 new jobs after being awarded a contract from mobile-broadband player 3 to provide satellite services to homes in rural Ireland.

As part of the NBS being rolled out by 3, Satellite Broadband Ireland will provide satellite-broadband services to up to 5pc of the 223,000 targeted buildings throughout rural Ireland.

“The extension of broadband will encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, which is a unique asset of the knowledge economy in Ireland, and will help secure a sustainable future for firms and entrepreneurs outside urban areas,” says Kevin Ryan, co-founder of Satellite Broadband Ireland.

The cost of the satellite broadband service to consumers within the NBS areas will be the same price as 3’s NBS mobile broadband service – €19.99 per month, plus a once-off charge of €49 for installation and hardware – providing much-needed broadband connectivity in these areas to both homes and businesses.

Digiweb move

Another broadband provider Digiweb has identified 8,169 businesses and organisations in Cork, Tipperary, Kerry, Clare and Meath that struggle to access the internet. It has unveiled a new 10Mbps satellite technology that will cover 100pc of the country by 2010.

The 8,169 organisations in the broadband blackspots are mainly small businesses in rural areas. Many of those identified are involved in the retail, tourism and agribusiness sectors.

This research follows a recently published report from the National Competitiveness Council that ranked Ireland in 12th position in the EU15 for broadband penetration.

Counties with the highest numbers of organisations  struggling to access the internet via broadband technology are Cork (1,071), Tipperary (712), Kerry (662), Clare (653) and Meath (494).

Satellite-broadband technology, says Declan Campbell, chief operations officer of Digiweb, is now seen as an integral part of the overall digital strategy for many of these counties.

In May this year, Digiweb launched its new satellite-broadband service ‘Digiweb Tooway’, which offers download speeds of up to 3.6Mbps to all of its satellite customers. With a major new satellite infrastructure upgrade programme planned, Digiweb will increase the speeds to 10Mbps throughout all areas of Ireland later in 2010.

“For businesses seeking to take advantage of web applications that can enhance business performance or even those that just want to use services, such as online business banking, it’s essential that they have secure, always-on, high-quality broadband,” Campbell explains.

“The demand for satellite broadband has been phenomenal so far, particularly from organisations and residents in rural areas, with restricted or no internet access.”

Wi-Fi reliance

Aside from the issue of access, many business broadband users rely heavily on the use of Wi-Fi in their offices, out and about at meetings in hotels and at conferences at railway stations and airports. Wi-Fi provides a wireless local area network in and around a location, with many of these networks being available publicly.

But the lurking danger is that despite enjoying the use of Wi-Fi, few businesses are aware that their private Wi-Fi networks aren’t always properly secured. Wi-Fi networks in Irish cities – including those in popular hotels and cafes – are vulnerable to being hacked, according to a study of more than 6,545 wireless networks in three cities.

The study of networks in Dublin, Cork and Limerick revealed they are vulnerable to attacks by hackers and are liable to exposing sensitive personal or business data to unauthorised users.

The findings of the assessment, which was expanded this year to include Cork and Limerick, has shown that once again the use of wireless encryption to protect wireless networks remains poor.

The 56pc of networks found to be vulnerable used either no encryption to protect communications (19pc) or weak encryption, which hackers can trivially break in a matter of minutes (36pc).

By analysing those networks identified as either residential or business networks (ie excluding public networks), it was found that the incidence of unsecured wireless network drops to 46pc.

In addition, further analysis of the business and residential networks reveals that Limerick has the most secure wireless landscape (at 62pc) compared to Dublin and Cork (54pc and 53pc respectively). The survey shows that the level of wireless security in Dublin has remained consistent with last year, when 54pc of connections were also found to be insecure in the capital city.

“The results of this analysis will certainly be of concern for businesses across the country,” says Colm McDonnell, partner, enterprise risk services, Deloitte.

“This is the third year in a row we have performed this survey and it’s clear the popularity of wireless networking has not led to a corresponding awareness of wireless security. This is somewhat surprising given that there have been a number of incidents both at home and abroad that have highlighted the importance of adequate encryption. It’s quite simple – without the sufficient security measures in place, sensitive data will be lost.

“The clear message that arises from this year’s analysis is that there is still not enough awareness surrounding the security pitfalls that wireless connectivity brings – we would encourage wireless users both at home and in the office to address this as a matter of priority,” concludes McDonnell.

This article first appeared in Owner Manager magazine