After several weeks of rumours, Eircom officially announced their new DSL packages today.

It’s not a bad deal. All existing customers will see improvements of between 2x and 4x in total downstream bandwidth, depending on the monthly subscription. The best improvement is for Home+ users, who jump from 512 Kb/s to 2 MB/s. Smart Telecom’s equivalent deal is still significantly cheaper, but offers only 128 Kb/s instead of 256 Kb/s upstream.

There was an opportunity for Eircom to also increase upstream bandwidth, but they appear not to have done so. Several people are speculating that this is to discourage business users from switching to VoIP, thus undermining Eircom’s voice revenue; this could well be the case.

No discussion at all of bandwidth caps – in light of Smart Telecom’s cap-free policy, Eircom may have decided to leave it be for now, privately targetting only those users that are blatantly abusing it.

Interesting times…