Irish ISP agrees to disconnect repeat P2P users

[platinumsword]

"Three strikes" rules have come to Ireland in a sudden and unexpected way, as the country's largest ISP settles a court case brought by the music industry and agrees to take action on file-swappers. Repeat offenders will be disconnected from the 'Net.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/irish-isp-agrees-to-disconnect-repeat-p2p-users.ars

[Sean]

This is surely causing a lot of concern in Ireland. For example, on the Irish discussion forum boards.ie, a thread started about this two days ago has already got 474 replies and over 17,000 views at this time of writing.

Unfortunately in Ireland, there is not much competition on the ISP market except in the major towns and cities where exchanges have Local-loop unbundling. As a result, all the DSL packages available outside of these exchanges similar pricing for 1Mbps, 3Mbps and 7.6Mbps packages, not to mention strict monthly usage caps of 10GB, 30GB & 50GB, respectively.

As Eircom already has a significant bandwidth issue in certain parts of the country, maybe they figure this will help discourage heavy P2P downloaders from using its network and solve its contention issue…

[Nosmartz]

I don’t think our friends in Ireland have much to care about as their speeds/reliability there weren’t that great to begin with…along with the monthly caps its just another case of ISP’s taking control of what they’ll do for you in the future

its a shame…seems you never get what you pay for anymore…thats ok though…Ireland is the land of great people, fun and Lager/Beer…so i lift one to each and every one that will be affected by this and say “Cheer Up…things will get better”

[Sean]

The pub is certainly the main place most people socialise in Ireland, even despite the hefty duty applied on alcohol. Also, most good Irish pubs have real musicians playing live music, something I also much prefer over the ear wrecking disco music played at some places. When ever we have visitors from abroad, one of the places we usually go to is a pub with musicians playing accordions, violins and so on. I know these musicians enjoy their time also and I’m sure they make a nice income that isn’t affected by P2P music sharing.

I usually only go to the pub on special occasions, but when ever I do, it’s the usual, as taken on St. Patrick’s day:

Cheers.

[Nosmartz]

i think most would benefit from getting off the net for a bit and going down to a pub and experience a slice of real Irish life…maybe a pub crawl for a few weekends in a row and then they may see…and say…“ya know…not havin reliable speedy net access ain’t that bad…on the weekends i can look forward to pubs, women and live music to take its place…who could ask for more?”…hell i wish i could do that …and anyhow…who could say no to these lovely young ladies?