According to Global Crossing and the Government, the main partners in the broad-band announcement yesterday, the connectivity project to link the State directly to the United States and to Global Crossing's European fibre-optic network will rocket Ireland to the forefront in terms of broadband capacity.

Broad-band telecommunications networks offer the ability to send and receive high-bandwidth images, text, sound, and video, and even the prospect of creating and communicating through online, virtual reality worlds. All of these capabilities are widely predicted to become the norm for exchanging information in the future.

"Ireland will be one of the best connected countries in the world," said Global Crossing's chief executive in Ireland, Mr K. Eugene Shutler, at the launch event. "All of Europe is in a race to complete capacity, but I believe Ireland has acted with great speed and great understanding. You're talking about a growth curve here that's very extraordinary. Ireland is certainly well into the race."

While Ireland has had extraordinary success in attracting technology companies - not least because it built a state-of-the-art digital voice telecommunications network back in the 1980s - it has been slow to find ways of creating the infrastructure of the future.

But partially, perhaps even largely, this has been due to the vestigial remains of state-run, euro-style telecommunications operations which meant that change came slowly, prices remained as high as possible, and innovation and investment were unnecessary novelties. Without competition, there were few compelling reasons for an entrenched, protected player like Telecom Eireann to race to put in fibre networks.

Not that the situation changed rapidly once new competitors came in. The kind of networks needed now costs tens, even hundreds, of millions of pounds to develop. Ireland was just too small to make such a network a state project. Telecom, despite being the largest network provider, could not possibly take on such a task itself either.

This project is an indication that the Government found a useful tool in its report from its Advisory Committee on Telecommunications, which recommended establishing public/private partnerships. The Global Crossing project is such a partnership.

Global Crossing, having won the tender to supply the broad infrastructural brush strokes for the overall network picture, gets some attractive incentives for coming in and running things.

Ireland should win all round, because the Republic will have a concrete offering to wave before prospective e-commerce and general corporate interests. According to Mr Shutler, when the initiative is completed in the second quarter of next year, Ireland will have a broadband network with more than half the current capacity that Global Crossing provides to all its customers in the North Atlantic.