Free line rental for life? What's the catch?

Smart Telecom has come up with a pretty amazing offer to tempt you to sign up for its broadband service - free line rental (voice and data) for life. Sounds as if there has to be a catch.

Other than the fact Smart Telecom is not guaranteed to be around forever, I can't see one. The offer is available to only the first 100,000 (!) customers (will they even get that many - I love their optimism!). The equally good news is that Smart's broadband service is is rated at 2-megabits per second (four times faster than vanilla broadband from other operators, but sadly the upload speed is still a paltry 128kbps) - and all for only €35 a month.

If there is one catch, it's probably that Smart is so far hooked up to only a few phone exchanges (thanks, Eircom!). Choosing a few random phone numbers of friends across Dublin showed that few of them were eligible. But sure have a go yourself, your mileage may vary.

I asked an Eircom fella recently whether we'd ever get faster consumer broadband and he looked at me as if I'd propositioned him. So don't expect Eircom to start competing on that front.