Now that it’s all ‘official’ (rather than just decided?) I suppose we can all comment on it. The newspapers are, briefly, full of smiley, posey pictures; all the politicians and aspiring politicians crawl out of the slime to either congratulate the government on another brilliant scheme or berate them for wasting money on another half-baked idea.

As far as the national picture is concerned, looking at the positives, it’s great that the government is prepared to step in and fund the provision of broadband for everybody. On the negative side, the government have surely set the bar too low, in that: less than 2MB cannot really be considered broadband in the 21st century (forget the moans about bandwidth reducing when there are lots of users – all broadband is contended); the target of ‘covering the whole country’ is imprecise – in the UK they are specifying the supply of broadband ‘to every household’, which is quite different.

To illustrate the second criticism, consider Achill. The island, as far as the NBS is concerned, is split into two parts: one is on the ‘planned’ list, the other is on the ‘not included’ list. Why does one part of the island miss out? Well, there is already a 3 mast which, notionally, covers this part of the island. The reality, as anyone with the slightest experience of cellphone signals will realise, is that in some spots there is a great signal but move around the corner and there is none. Achill is not flat; hills get in the way, leaving ’shadows’ where there is no signal. Then there are walls: most broadband users do not want to sit in the garden surfing the net, at least not in Ireland. So again, some houses and offices are fine, others get nothing. There is no reason to believe that the ‘planned’ part of Achill will fare any better.

Achill is not a special case: this picture will be repeated all over the country. Hence to say that the whole country will be covered by broadband, one way or another, is meaningless. You’ll find the usual ‘haves and have-nots’ thing between wired and wireless areas, and between good and bad signal areas. Let’s not pretend, either, that the proposed satellite coverage for areas where a cellular signal is impractical is the answer. As a satellite ‘broadband’ user for several years, I can attest to the deeply unsatisfactory nature of this ’solution’.

I have no doubt that, if I am one of the lucky ones, I will appreciate the improvements of cellular broadband over satellite broadband, but I will continue to look with envy at those a few miles up the road with their DSL lines.

Living a long way from anywhere has some fabulous advantages, but one of them is not connectivity. We knew this when we moved here, but we did dream of a time when even this remote spot would be connected electronically to the rest of the world by something more than the string and chewing gum that was Telecom Eireann’s rural network circa 2000.

Technology moves on at such high speed that it wasn’t long before we could realistically expect some kind of reasonable service and, following a bit of a local campaign (I won’t bore you with the details, well maybe another time) we managed to get a ‘village’ wireless scheme with a satellite link to the internet.

It’s been a long and frustrating story, and it goes on. Last Thursday some people from Digiweb, the ISP, arrived. They needed to point our satellite dish at a different satellite so they removed the dish from its concrete plinth and bolted it back in a different position. Then they couldn’t find the satellite. So ended Thursday.

On Friday they came back and, after several hours, managed to establish a connection. It was very slow, but we’ve found that’s often the case after it’s been messed with and it usually speeds up after a couple of hours.

Not on this occasion. Between Friday and the time of writing my speed tests have ranged from a low of 2KB/s to a blistering 7.5KB/s (we should be seeing between 64KB/s and 256KB/s). The support people at Digiweb are very nice and are working as hard as they can, which is nice. But we’re still in some kind of techno-limbo.

Rumour has it that 3 Ireland have cellphone coverage here now, though it’s not indicated on their coverage maps. If Digiweb don’t sort us out soon I may have to buy one of 3’s data modems and see if we can share the connection on our network.