Email and information surveillance

Eircode and the geographical format war

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26 January 2016

Niall Kitson portraitMinister for Communications Alex White’s performance on RTE Radio One’s Today with Sean O’Rourke defending the Eircode system became a trending topic on Twitter as users vented their frustration at yet another public sector omnishambles. Budgeted at €25 million, the system, according to a report from the Comptroller & Auditor General last September, has cost €38 million and could go as high as €50 million. Not to mention the “unsatisfactory procurement” practices cited in the C&AG’s report. Going over budget isn’t terminal if a project makes its money back or turns a profit but the lack of interest in or necessity for using the general public of the seven-digit code is.

So what’s gone wrong? The answers could be found in the exact same three principles that decided all our recent digital format wars, be it the move from vinyl to CD, VHS to DVD, and HD from SD: convenience, cost and content. Some of this argument is a stretch, but bear with me and I’ll keep the puns to a minimum.

Convenience
I began writing this post from our office in Dublin 18, or rather D18 W2R3. The increased accuracy would be much appreciated by the postal service as a unique identifier for a building that doesn’t have a street or a road number. The same logic applies to the 35% of rural homes and businesses that would only be known by a name and a townland. It’s these ‘non-unique addresses’ that Eircode was designed to do away with.

From a systemic perspective Eircode is a faster way to sort mail and get it into the hands of carriers while reducing the potential for human error. For companies reliant on different delivery and courier services it would cut down on directions of the form ‘if you’ve gone past the church, you’ve gone too far’ etc. This would be a win if An Post was using it – t did ask for it in the first place – but it’s not.

Unfortunately DHL and FedEx have publicly said they will not be using Eircode, either, as their preferred system using longitude and latitude has been in use for almost 20 years. The emergency services, too, are reticent about Eircode and GPS manufacturers TomTom and Garmin aren’t using it (the latter has opted for the more flexible Loc8 Code – more later). The Minister said Google is coming on board, though, so perhaps other brands may follow.

One important criticism of Eircode is that the assignment of codes makes no logical sense. Unlike car license plates that plainly state the year and place of registration, Eircode uses a ‘language agnostic’ system to bypass arguments over whether locations should be classified in English or Irish, leaving us with a seemingly arbitrary assignment of letters. This allows Dublin to keep its precious D identifiers while parts of Cork and Limerick have V94 T12 and V94. You can’t guess your way out of trouble if you’re caught short.

How does this break down for the average consumer? Not having a post code system may put us 100 years behind the rest of the world but it doesn’t matter a jot if we get our mail anyway. So no, for as long as the consumer is able to get their occasion cards and bills, Eircode it does not deliver any appreciable improvement.

Cost
Having established that Eircode has some value for businesses but none for consumers and given the state of the public finances, you have to ask whether the money have been better spent on support for SMEs, research, education or healthcare? Has Eircode cost more than it’s worth? Until the current generation of postal carrier with a lick of common sense dies out, it’s a system for the sake of having a system. That’s MiniDisk territory.

Content
I’m not talking about changing the type of post that gets delivered but what services require you to use it. PayPal requires you to enter an Eircode if you want to sign up for an account and it does sort out the problem of what to put in that obligatory post code box when buying anything online.

If someone in Amazon/Apple/Microsoft woke up in the morning and said ‘Eircode. I like it. Make it obligatory on our order forms’. You would have a scenario when content providers would be able to dictate the terms of the infrastructure they rely on. What effect Google will have in part depends on what the competition does. Trendsetter or failed inventor? Mountain View has been on both sides of that description (see Gmail and Google Wave) and has no problem with ‘failing fast’. It’s probably an investor in a dozen competing technologies.

But is it any good?
Quality isn’t always an arbiter of whether a format will survive (Betamax, anyone?) but at least you could give a good product a lick of credit for trying. Government tells us Eircode is the best system of its kind in the world. Modern, accurate and developed in conjunction with industry partners and experts from the public sector, it is the best of all possible worlds. All it needs is a little time to sink into the public consciousness.

Unfortunately this is not the case. Eircode suffers a fatal flaw in that it is database-driven. Any updates to Eircode such as the addition of new housing developments cannot be done automatically or logically based on an algorithm. Codes are assigned, not generated on the fly.

As it applies to buildings instead of features, it’s also of little use to anyone who finds themselves in need of emergency treatment in a remote location where a code would be preferable to a description.

Alas, Eircode fails at its most basic function in a space where there are more sophisticated alternatives. My preference is Loc8 Code, a closed source system usable with Microsoft Office and Garmin GPS devices and developed with GPS Ireland. As it’s algorithm-driven you can generate codes for specific locations (not just buildings) and even temporary sites, such as festivals. Think of it as the equivalent of a security suite driven by heuristics compared to one based on a database.

Eircode was meant to be a solution to a problem that An Post wanted to have addressed in the 1990s. What we got in the 2010s is a product of public sector group think that makes no sense to anyone on an organisational or technical level. It fails at being cheap, easy-to-use, is less accurate than the competition and still entirely optional. Basically, we’re stuck with the USB single of post codes.

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