The big news this week was that Smart Telecom (the largest independent Irish telecomms company) announced a new residential DSL product with some very attractive features:

• 2 Mb/s download (128 Kb/s upload)
• No download limit
• No fixed contention ratio – bandwidth will be increased to match demand
• Free line rental to the first 100,000 subscribers (the total installed base of broadband in Ireland at the moment is about 100K users)
• Voice service included (free calls to other Smart Telecom users, cheaper rates than Eircom to elsewhere).

As usual, there has been plenty of discussion at boards.ie about this. Most people are impressed by the high bandwidth / low cost ratio, but concerned about the miserly 128 Kb/s upstream bandwidth.

Still, at €35, I expect they’ll make a killing. It will be interesting to see if and how the other ISPs beef up their offerings to make them more competitive.