RTÉ Television's fiftieth birthday

Which was why RTE initially adopted 405 lines as the line standard. There were so many UK 405 line set already in use, particularly in Dublin it would have been madness not to have done. Most other '50 Hz' countries that started TV services in the 1950s and 60s, adopted 625 lines from the outset. France and Belgium had the 819 line system for a while, though Belgium's version was bandwidth (aka resolution) limited to save RF spectrum.

RTE started simulcasting in 625 from 1962 from the two initial transmitters that served the east and north west, expansion to the rest of Ireland was 625 only.

Further reading:-

http://www.irish-tv.com/405.asp

Some parts of Ireland had MMDS for a while didn't they? (MMDS used short range microwave transmitters to provide a sort of equivalent of satellite or cable using terrestrial circuits)

I was in Co Galway just before Christmas, loads of MMDS dishes on homes in that county, I don't know if the system is still active there, I should have asked my hosts !

Its still running, but there are only about 60,000 customers left, about 20,000 of which are on "Communal MMDS" which is a cable system fed off an MMDS dish. Less than 3,000 are left on analogue MMDS according to last available figures.

The MMDS licenses for Dublin, Galway, and Waterford (the old NTL areas) expire in 2012 and those for the rest of the country (formerly Chorus) expire in 2014, NTL having had two years knocked off its licenses for failing to meet digital roll out targets way back in the early 2000s. The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) have recently published a report in which it states that it is minded to grant UPC an extension to its MMDS licenses for the ex-NTL areas so as to bring them up to April 2014, and then switch the whole thing off to facilitate LTE mobile services.

When MMDS started in 1990, it was typically the only way customers in rural Ireland (particularly in the West and South West) could legally view BBC and ITV services. These days there is Sky and Freesat and ComReg's opinion seems to be that these customer constitute a small portion (about 10%) of UPC's subscriber base anyway and that they should be pushed to Sky/Freesat at this stage. ComReg also has tried (and failed) a number of times to sell the pay-TV licence for DTT and may feel that the absence of MMDS might make the licence more attractive.



Not microwave, terrestrial services! These called themselves "community television" but were known colloquially as deflectors. These essentially used a high mast to pick up the BBC, ITV, and C4/S4C services off air and then retransmit them terrestrially. They caused a lot of trouble for the original MMDS companies (principally those belonging to the Princes Holdings/Independent Wireless Cable group). The police turned a blind eye to their activities and when an TD (MP) was elected to the Dáil (parliament) in Donegal in 1997 on the sole issue of having their activities legalised, the minority government was forced to legalize them. This happened in 1999 on the basis that it would only last a year or two until DTT started. As we now know it took until 2011 for DTT to finally launch and the regulations are still in force. We are told this will be the last year they will be licensed for but since DTT hasn't got the UK terrestrials on it (which was expected originally) I wouldn't hold my breath that they will shut down. People are less willing to pay the "voluntary" contributions (which you were basically forced to pay for fear of being austracised by your neighbours) now that Freesat exists, however.