Only traffic jam on the info-highway is busy line

Travelling to work on the info-highway, the commuting time between the west of Ireland and eastern France is reduced to the time it takes to dial a number and the only traffic jams are engaged telephone lines.

Mr Pearse McDonnell, a software engineer with Grenoble-based Temento Systems, has been telecommuting since starting his job in 1995, first from his then home in the Beaujolais hills north of Lyons, and more recently from his original hometown of Castlebar, Co Mayo, where he, his wife and their two daughters now live.

In 1995, while working at the Advanced Computer Research Institute in Lyons, his ex-boss, Mr Christian Francois, persuaded him to join Temento. The company, co-founded by Mr Francois, develops software products to test specialised hardware such as chip modules and boards, but Mr McDonnell did not want to move to Grenoble. Mr Francois suggested that he work from home like many other staff. Soon Mr McDonnell became "the only programmer for miles around, looking out the window at vineyards".

Then last May, having spent six years in France, the family decided to move back to Ireland, and chose Castlebar. "The housing available in the west is much, much better," he says, as is the quality of life. A four-bedroomed house there can be rented for £400 a month, some £600 cheaper than Dublin. Additionally, for telecommuters such as him, Castlebar has a good IT infrastructure, being a finalist in Telecom Eireann's information age town competition last year.

One room of the house now hosts his networked high-end portable, desktop and Sun computers, along with a printer, a modem and a CD engraver, and he has swapped the view of vineyards for a suburban, tree-lined avenue. He uses a 56kbps modem to stay in touch with the office via an IOL Internet account. The line quality between Castlebar and the local IOL hub in Ballina is good enough to get about 46kbps, well ahead of the 33.6kbps he finds he gets in many other locations. "Now and then I've got glitches. You get bad days," he says, but four days out of five he logs on first time.

"I log in four or five times a day to exchange mail and problems with Grenoble," he says, adding that he downloads or uploads software in the evenings when calls are cheaper. This has to be done only once every two weeks, and usually consists of a couple of megabytes of code. If there is a lot more than this, the software is sent by post on a CD-Rom. These can hold up to 600MB of data, and with CD-Rom engravers now costing "a couple of hundred pounds", Mr McDonnell says they have "helped telecommuting no end, saving hours of downloads on even an ISDN line".

Telecommuters traditionally swap motoring costs for phone costs, but Mr McDonnell reduces these too by using Telecom Eireann for local calls to IOL, and Athlone-based Jupiter Telecom for long-distance calls to the office in France and to customers in Britain and the US. He estimates the work-related part of his bills to be just £75 a month, not much more than the cost of calls he would make from an office in Grenoble anyway.

With him working from home, Temento saves on office rental, along with ancillary costs such as heating and insurance. Mr McDonnell, in turn, saves on motoring expenses and commuting time. However, the saved time is often spent doing additional tasks because, as he puts it: "You're the receptionist, the systems administrator, everything. If the printer runs out, you go into town and get new paper. The time you would spend commuting to and from work is spent fixing problems."

However, for him, and, according to surveys, for a growing number of IT professionals worldwide, working from home improves the quality of life, even if it requires discipline and trust. A report published last year by Olsten Corp, a New York human resources company, found that more than half of US firms permit telecommuting, and three-quarters plan to allow it this year. Who said you have to get up early to beat the traffic?