Poor mobile and broadband coverage is hampering investment – Kilcoyne

Edwin McGreal

Businesses are being put off from setting up in many parts of Mayo due to poor mobile and broadband coverage.
That’s the view of Cllr Michael Kilcoyne, the Chairperson of Mayo County Council’s Economic Development and Enterprise Support Strategic Policy Committee.
In his capacity as chair of that committee, Cllr Kilcoyne wrote to the Communications Regulator to highlight the lack of progress in addressing this problem.
“It’s not good for a county like Mayo, trying to get investment into it. It should be a priority but we are being neglected,” he told The Mayo News.  
“It’s affecting a lot of areas. Castlebar, Tourmakeady, Partry, large parts of south Mayo, Newport and a lot more pockets of the county. Mobile and broadband signals are getting a lot worse.”
In the letter to the Communications Regulator, Cllr Kilcoyne expresses his ‘disappointment at the lack of responses from a variety of mobile phone service providers to previous correspondence in relation to areas of poor coverage and a perceived deterioration in quality of service’.
The council wrote to service providers with a list of specific areas where there were signal issues.
Cllr Kilcoyne states that while there are no ‘universal service obligations’ attached to mobile phone licenses in Ireland, he considers it ‘entirely unacceptable that we are still awaiting any response from the service providers’.

Deterioration
“To further compound our dissatisfaction there are significant concerns that service quality has, in fact, deteriorated in the intervening period.
“It is unacceptable to us that there are major areas of extremely poor coverage and areas along our national primary road network that consistently result in call termination. In the context of our efforts to attract investment and retain existing levels of employment this is simply not good enough,” he wrote.
Cllr Kilcoyne told The Mayo News last night that the Economic SPC had hosted representatives from service providers last year.  
 “We ran into brick walls when we spoke with the mobile phone and broadband companies. We had the operators in last year and we may as well have been talking to Santa Claus,” he said.