Government claims that recent broadband rollout has surpassed expectations and is months ahead of schedule are "disingenuous in the extreme", according to the Labour Party.
Speaking today at a at broadband conference today Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey claimed that in 2004 "the number of broadband subscribers stood at a mere 56,000 people."
"Since then," he added, "broadband take-up has grown rapidly and over 100,000 new broadband connections were made in the first half of this year alone.
"I am delighted to announce today that we now have more than 410,000 broadband subscribers in Ireland, smashing the target I set with several months to spare."
This claim, however, had been sharply criticised by Labour spokesman on communications Tommy Broughan, who insists the minister simply reduced his target when it became evident that the original could not be met.
"The Minister's original target in his Department's 2004 broadband policy directive was for 500,000 subscribers by mid-2005 and 600,000 plus subscribers by the end of 2006." Mr Broughan said today.
"When it was increasingly clear that this target would not be reached, instead of establishing a more effective policy, the Minister simply decided to change the target and downgraded his broadband goal to reaching 400,000 by the end of 2006."
Mr Broughan also took issue with the minister's claim that 30 per cent of Irish households now have broadband, describing it as "untrue".
"By the internationally respected measurement of broadband lines per capita, Ireland has still barely reached nine lines per capita as compared to Denmark (29.3), Netherlands (26.8), and even the UK (18.9)," said Mr Broughan.
Mr Dempsey was also criticised for the bandwidth available in broadband packages. "Ireland is still largely rolling out introductory broadband connections of 0.5 megabits while world leaders like Korea and Japan have installed up to 100 megabits of bandwidth.
"The reality is that when the election comes, Dempsey and his government will have dismally failed Ireland in rolling out broadband," concluded Mr Broughan.
Mr Dempsey told the conference today that broadband will soon be rolled out to a fifth of the population living in the most isolated regions. The minister vowed to deliver the service to up to 20 per cent of people in areas where it is currently uneconomic to do so.
He also said that the next step was to make people more aware of what broadband has to offer. "It is not enough to just make broadband available, we need to start demonstrating what broadband can do for those who may not have considered getting broadband before," said Mr Dempsey.
