Mr Crumb in Finea, Co Westmeath, is the type of business that is central to a viable future for rural Ireland.
Set up by entrepreneur Jason Coyle in 1996, it now employs 150 people making fresh breadcrumb-based products for an impressive client list of multinational retailers including Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Morrisons.
He has satellite broadband which he says is worse than useless for business a lot of the time with speeds of less than 1Mbps (megabits per second).
“We have broadband,” he says, “but not broadband of the capability or the capacity to run a modern business the way it should.”
The local Eircom exchange has never been upgraded, so Mr Coyle’s business has been unable to get conventional wireless broadband.
He has now set up an administration office in the UK because of the absence of broadband in Finea.
In work the only internet usage is for sending emails. Everything else is “stripped back”.
Mr Crumb has back up of a 3 Mobile dongle through the now defunct National Broadband Scheme, but it is hardly satisfactory.
“I have to go and plug it out of a power source and put it to a window at an angle,” Mr Coyle says.
Everything other than manufacturing is done online, which creates its own problems.
Suppliers frequently send large documents via email to be filled out. The files are often too large to be opened at the company’s headquarters.
“The technical manager was filling in some administrative details and the broadband went down and she lost half an hour to an hour’s work,” he says.
Mr Coyle is acquainted with a web entrepreneur from Finea who sells hotel bedrooms online. He would like to work from home but cannot because of the absence of internet. Instead he commutes to Dublin every day.
