Hope on horizon now Communications Bill might at last get proper Dail airing

Some hope is on the horizon now that the delayed but critical Communications Bill should be published within the coming weeks.

According to Department of Public Enterprise general secretary Mr Brendan Tuohy, the Bill is nearly ready to be published and urgently needs a reading early in the new year.

However, this is now entirely dependent on the Dβil making the Bill a priority. We are in the same situation we were in with the similarly important E-Commerce Bill, which also nearly sank from sight when no Dβil time was allotted to it until a last minute reprieve.

This should be a top concern, or lawmakers risk plunging the State to the bottom of the competitiveness league just as the economy is in decline.

As anyone concerned about national infrastructure knows, the proposed Bill contains crucial proposals regarding structure and powers of the Office of the Director of Telecommunications Regulation. The Bill would see this office turned into a far more powerful three-person committee with the ability to compel telecommunications companies to comply with its rulings.

This commission could also force companies such as Eircom to comply with EU legislation regarding unbundling the local loop. Given the inertia in the broadband market at the moment, and serious worries about telecommunications infrastructure, this Bill is badly needed. The Dβil needs to realise that such legislation is vital and should make room for the Bill.

Another piece of good news on the infrastructure front is that the Government's Advisory Committee on Information Communications (ACI) - comprising national and international figures in the communications industry - holds its final meeting in Washington, DC next week. The Committee was established as a reprise of the Advisory Committee on Telecommunications (ACT) of a few years ago, which had on it luminaries such as internet pioneer and MCI vice-president Dr Vinton Cerf.

The ACT's brief was to take a hard look at telecommunications infrastructure and needs, and report on how the State could move the situation forward as quickly as possible.

The report underlies many of the Government's key decisions in this area and is recognised as having been a real spur to pushing out infrastructure projects. The ACI has been working to do the same, in particular regarding the provision of broadband internet connectivity.

The group had been scheduled to hold its final meeting in October but September's events in the US led to its postponement. There's a good chance the report will be produced close to schedule. It should then be available from the Department of Public Enterprise.

One of the more interesting tech events of the past two weeks was a forum at which 11 university or research institute-based projects made three-minute "elevator pitches" to an assembled audience of venture capitalists (VC), bankers and others.

An elevator pitch is a quick summary of the who, what, how and why of a business, intended to capture the interest of a VC.

Sponsored by a rash of commercial interests including 3i, AIB, Iona and Trinity Venture Capital, the forum showcased some truly impressive research coming out of the country.

I had thought that the academics and researchers might have a hard time giving an effective business spiel, especially when they had projects with titles like Associative Parallel Processor for Logic Event-Driven Simulation. Yet all these projects were summed up in an effective manner that put to shame the supposedly more business-oriented crowd usually at such events.

There's an absolutely vital ground swell of interest right now in getting Irish research out of the labs and into commercial form. This is an area that should be a top priority of Government, VCs, entrepreneurs, universities, institutions and researchers.

At the moment there is no formal agreement system by which researchers can partner with or spin off from their institutions and go from science to market. Some institutions are dealing with this on an uninformed, ad-hoc basis.

Some are asking for such ridiculously large percentages of any proposed companies that researchers cannot get any outside funding at all, with the result that their research languishes. Others have no idea at all what the legal complexities of a spin-off are. However, some are very smart and supportive, and are encouraging researchers to think like entrepreneurs.

This is a serious issue for the State and needs diligent commitment from a number of parties to formulate policy and a tight legal framework that supports indigenous researchers as they take their ideas to market.

More activity is in the pipeline. Anyone interested might want to attend a special seminar on Thursday, November 14th, entitled "Campus Companies. . . what you need to know". For full information, contact David Neville at (01) 700-8508 or dneville@firsttuesday.ie.

klillington@irish-times.ie