After years of seeing eyes glaze over at the mention of "wireless in the local loop", the telecommunications industry is moving from theory to practice. Ocean has just run successful tests of a technology that can deliver high-speed Internet access through an unpretentious white box, obviating the need to lay expensive fibre optic cable.
The box, made by Lucent Technologies, was perched on top of the ESB headquarters in Dublin, and was too small to be seen from the ground.
Testers verified that it beamed the information directly to another office block not far away.
Ocean - the telecommunications company owned by British Telecom and the ESB - has applied for one of four broadband licences for the technology. The snappily-named Fixed-Wireless-Point-To-Multipoint-Access permits will be issued by regulatory authorities later this month.
The company said the system would prove a boon to the small and medium-sized business sector.
Essentially the system works like two mobile phones strapped to the sides of buildings - except that these boxes can transmit 155mb of data each second.
This gives customers not just high-speed Internet access for their electronic commerce, but also allows them to link more than one building on a single computer and phone network.
The data is heavily encrypted, preventing anyone from eavesdropping on conversations or picking up data.
The technology will allow Ocean, if it is successful in acquiring a licence, to bypass Telecom Eireann's pipelines - and save the expense and trouble of digging up pavements to lay its own. The range of about 4km means it is essentially an urban solution.
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