We're all on board the superhighway express

When US vice president Al Gore coined the term "information superhighway" in 1992, it meant little to many people. Access to the Internet was restrict to a small number of people, mainly academics, and the notion of Internet commerce was in its infancy. One commentator was even moved to pose the question: "How can they talk about information superhighways and global communities linked by telecommunications, when the majority of the world's population has never made a telephone call?"

While there may still be a lot of truth in that particular sentiment, the fact is that the information superhighway has rolled into Ireland. There are now some 160,000 people with electronic mail (email) addresses in Ireland and 60,000 of these have Internet access. However, according to David Mee of Internet service provider Eunet, these are only guesstimates. "It is very difficult to assess the real size of the market," he says. "When we connect a company they might give hundreds of staff members individual email addresses and nobody would be counting them. All that we can say for definite is that the market is growing very rapidly."

This market growth has seen the emergence of a number of Internet service providers, including Tinet and Indigo, both owned by Telecom Eireann, Ireland On-Line owned by An Post, and Eunet now owned by Esat Telecom. Despite the fact that there has been some consolidation in the market, with just three main players now operating, access rates here are extremely competitive with average costs being about £12 per month.

Others are also moving into the market and Bank of Ireland, in association with Tinet, is now offering BoINet which gives subscribers up to three separate email addresses for just £12 per month.

A bank moving into this market is not in the least bit strange, due to the advent of online banking and Internet commerce. Ireland now has its own virtual shopping mall where people can purchase goods from the likes of House of Ireland with their credit cards, and Bank of Ireland has launched its own on-line banking facility. These advances are made possible due to the development of SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) technology. This uses highly sophisticated encryption, or encoding, software to ensure that your credit card details don't fall into the wrong hands.

While businesses are already making use of advanced telecommunications services for Internet commerce, wide area networking of computers, electronic data interchange and so on, the education sector is now beginning to catch up.

In association with the Department of Education, Telecom Eireann is investing £10 million in "wiring up" schools throughout the country. This will provide an email address for every student - of any age - and teacher in the country. It will also provide free Internet access up to a certain level of usage and a free ISDN or standard telephony for every school in the country. The day is not far off when your seven year old child will email you to tell you that he's having his tea in a friend's house.

Another Telecom Eireann initiative has been its £20 million investment in the Information Age Town project, recently won by Ennis, County Clare. This involves free telephone connections for everyone in the town who does not have one, free voice mail facilities on all phones, and the installation of a large number of personal computers in local schools and the community itself. There are also a number of other initiatives which will place Ennis at the forefront of the information revolution.

Such was the response to the Information Age Town competition, in fact, that Telecom Eireann is now involved in projects with the runners-up, which included Castlebar, Killarney and Kilkenny, and is forming a network of the 50 towns which entered. Enquiries have come in form countries as far apart as Australia and Canada which wish to duplicate the project.

But for serious users of telecommunications technology the big issues are bandwidth and speed. Put very simply, increasing band-width has the same effect as widening a pipe - the flow speeds up. This means for people wanting to use video-conferencing or download very large files, the broader the band-width the better. This is crucial for Ireland's burgeoning international call centre business and other industries, such as Fexco in Kerry, which specialise in international transactions.

Telecom Eireann has installed a broadband frame relay which circles the country connecting up all of the major towns and which industry can simply "plug" into for their heavy band-width requirements. The installation of ISDN (integrated digital service network) lines around the country is also bringing speed and bandwidth into homes and small businesses throughout Ireland. ISDN lines can transmit data at up to five times the speed of standard telephone lines.

The installation of fibre optic networks is also facilitating the growth in telecommunications based commerce, both in terms of the speed of the technology and its capacity. To date, Telecom Eireann has laid 43,000 kilometres of fibre optic lines while Esat is in the process of adding several thousand more to this figure.

With technological advances and breakthroughs seemingly occurring on an almost daily basis, it is heartening to know that Ireland is keeping up with the pace and is well and truly aboard the information superhighway.