Dear Minister Mary Hanafin, In a recent interview (by Ian Campbell for the Irish Independent 31/10/2002) you said: "Even with the current availability of ADSL there isn't as much uptake as there should be. It's chicken and egg. Are people not taking it up because it isn’t cheap enough or because we haven’t increased awareness enough? I think it is a bit of both."

There is one accurate chicken connection though: Eircom is trying to treat us customers to chicken shit again:

It is offering ADSL to a small percentage of us, asking for the world’s highest subscription of 107 euros per month, then the world’s highest set up charge of 199 euros (which does not include the modem!), and has set a contemptible cap of 3 gigs, meaning that if anyone wants to really use their ADSL for what it is meant for, he will pay a lot extra (another nice surprise when the bill comes) and he has to pay for 2 months in advance and commit to a 1 year contract.

Any customer in his right mind will be extremely cautious to consign himself to an obviously overpriced one-year contract for Eircom's I-stream, especially if he has just been conned into the same company's overpriced and deceitfully advertised so-called "Hi-speed" product, which turned out to be nothing but a meagre narrowband ISDN pay per minute offer.