Company offers flat rate internet service through TV

Ten thousands television subscribers in Co Dublin are to be offered Internet access through the cable bringing television signals into their homes.

The service is being offered by Cable Management (Ireland) to its subscribers in Swords/Malahide at a cost of £30 per month. It is the first "flat-rate" Internet access service in the State.

Users will receive unlimited Internet access after paying £150 for a once-off cable modem installation linking their personal computer to the cable which currently delivers multi-channel television signals.

The Internet service feeding the PC will not interfere with existing television services.

The new service, CableNet, is offering Internet access speeds 50 times faster than a dial-up Internet connection and will provide permanent two-way broadband access to the World Wide Web. A special package for business users, CableNet Plus, will cost £45 per month. Both services will allow users to send and receive large amounts of data.

CableNet will be immediately available to 3,000 homes in the Swords/Malahide area, and will be rolled out to a further 7,000 homes in the area by early 1999.

According to Mr Ray Doyle, CMI chief executive, the CableNet service should be deployed across the company's 27 networks - primarily located in the midlands, and the north-west - within the next two years. However this will rely on feedback from existing customers.

CMI invested £1.5 million to upgrade its north Co Dublin network for the new two-way broadband service. It also facilitates voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony, which CMI hopes to introduce by the second quarter of next year, providing customers with unlimited local calls for a fixed price.

However, if the service is extended elsewhere, CMI may choose to only offer a one-way modem Internet service in order to reduce the infrastructural costs involved. Subscribers would receive information via the television cable but would send it via their telephone line.

The cost of a monthly subscription plus off-peak telephone charges is about £26, while accessing the Internet during peak times would bring the cost up to about £48.

Cable access to the Internet offers significant advantages over dial-up access. The user is permanently online, instead of having to dial up the service provider for each online session. Phone lines are kept free, rather than being tied up all the time the user is online, eliminating the need for a second phone line. The increased speed of access is also considerable, with download speeds of 128 kilobits per second. A standard dial-up modem offers speeds of just 56 kilobits per second. With the growing trend towards the delivery of music and video over the Internet, the advantages of faster download speeds are significant.

In a separate announcement, CMI said it was offering its premium subscribers a dial-up Internet connection service for 1 per month. While users will still have to pay telephone call charges, it offers considerable savings on the monthly service provider fee of about £10. It will only be available to CMI premium subscribers, who take out additional programming like Sky Sport or Sky Movies. The new announcements and the launch of a new website, www.cablenet.ie, represent CMI's first steps into the telecommunications arena.