The 'key for green technology' is high-speed technology

The Minister for Energy, Eamon Ryan was recently told that due to high-speed broadband not being available everywhere, the introduction of greenhouse emission slashing new technologies to Ireland is being hampered.

The “connected urban development” from Cisco, one of the world’s leading network companies, is to be deployed through five cities which include Hamburg, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Seoul, Madrid and Lisbon.

The promotion of sustainable urban connectivity and the creation of “smart work” cities that will use advanced teleconferencing technology and a range of other smart networking solutions in order to reduce the time spent commuting is the purpose of the rollout.

At Cisco’s San Jose headquarters a demonstration of its own high-tech Telepresence system was given to Mr Ryan by senior executive of Cisco. Executives in Virginia, Herndon and Galway, a location that has a Cisco centre of excellence that employs 200 staff that work mostly on the high value RD side, participated in a teleconference along with Mr Ryan. Travel in the company has been reduced by half according to Cisco.

Monique Mèche, who is responsible for European government affairs, spoke from Galway saying that the inclusion of Dublin in the project was something Cisco was happy to allow but because of the lack of widespread high-speed broadband in the city it could not do so at the current time.

The upgrading of the quality of broadband from DSL to vDSL throughout Dublin and urban regions was a huge priority said Mr Ryan and that he would work hard towards making sure that it happens as much as possible by encouraging network and cable providers.

The head of government affairs for Cisco, Robert Pepper, speaking from Herndon said that developing a high speed broadband network in Ireland was absolutely critical. The current 3G scheme for the outlying rural regions was not broadband he said, although this scheme was merely a “gap” measure according to Mr Ryan.

When it comes to gaining the benefits from the high speed bandwidth that will form part of digital TV transmission, Ireland was “not in an envious position” said Mr Pepper. In 2010 and 2011 he said that the rest of Europe would be in a position to take advantage of this, but the dependency would be on Britain for making it available in Ireland and that for UK regions Northern Ireland was at the end of the queue.