Patchy Internet access a worry for Irish business

VALENTIA ISLAND, Ireland, Mar 30: A huddle of fishing boats buffeted by the Atlantic wind, with the rolling peaks of the Irish mainland beyond, are all you can see from Diarmuid Ring's kitchen window.

Known as the last parish before America, tiny Valentia Island seems an unlikely setting for a 140-year-old communications revolution, particularly in light of 21st-century Ireland's poor transport links and patchy Internet access.

It was from here on July 13, 1866, that Isambard Kingdom Brunel's mighty SS Great Eastern set sail for Canada on a voyage that helped shape the modern world.

Two weeks and 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of cable later, the ship -- one of the Industrial Revolution's leviathans -- paddle-steamed into Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, completing the first viable telegraph link between Europe and the Americas.

''Joining the two continents together was something similar to putting a man on the moon from a technological point of view,'' says Ring, as islander and amateur local historian who worked for Western Union for 30 years.

Or, as London's Science Museum put it in a brief history published in 1950, until then ''each part of the world was isolated in time, as well as in space, from the rest, and world affairs in consequence moved at an altogether slower pace''.

Reuters, which had rocked London's financial markets a year earlier with news of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination -- 12 days after the event -- was able to report the new telegraphic link within hours of the Great Eastern's arrival in Canada: ''Messages of congratulation passing rapidly between Ireland and Newfoundland. Insulation and continuity perfect. Speed much increased since surplus cable has been cut off.'' Today, as the world undergoes another communications revolution thanks to the Internet, Valentia is one place where speed and continuity are in short supply.

FRUSTRATING AND EXPENSIVE

While owners of holiday homes mushrooming in this rugged, south-west corner of Ireland may relish its splendid isolation, economists warn such deficits pose a threat to productivity.

For Cathal Guiney, a chartered surveyor who tends Valentia's Web site, the lack of fast Internet links -- even at his office on the mainland -- is frustrating, inefficient and expensive.

''I'm not logged on all day because it costs too much but then customers get annoyed because I don't reply to e-mails quickly enough,'' he says.

Guiney's monthly phone bill is about 150 euros (0), compared with the 30 euros he would pay for a broadband package providing unlimited Internet access at 15 times the speed.

Such disparity has become a hot topic in Ireland after recent data showed one of Europe's strongest economies also has one of the region's lowest levels of high-speed Internet use.

By late 2005, only 5.3 percent of the population had broadband compared with more than 20 percent in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands and a European Union average of 11.5 per cent.

Eircom commercial director David McRedmond rejects charges by smaller rivals, who depend on the former state monopoly's network, that it favours investors over long-term investment. ''Our level of investment in our network is well ahead of other European countries and has been for five years,'' he says of the period since Eircom was bought, and later re-floated, by billionaire Tony O'Reilly's aptly named Valentia Consortium.

Eircom is adding 2,600 new broadband customers a week while the government also offers assistance in rural areas.

One beneficiary has been the town of Kenmare whose hotels serve some of the million or so visitors to County Kerry each year. Set amid mountains sculpted by the last ice age and a two-hour drive from Valentia, it now has broadband after 12 months of lobbying by local business and politicians.

''There's a very cosmopolitan population here, a huge cross-section of nationalities, some of them running businesses, and that lends itself to high internet usage,'' says Donald Lynch, president of Kenmare's Chamber of Commerce and Tourism.

''The next step is to expand it to the surrounding area,'' he adds, stressing the added social importance in remote areas.

MERCHANTS, BROKERS, TRADESMEN

Critics say competition from Asia and Eastern Europe means Ireland must do more to improve its infrastructure if it is to remain an attractive destination for investment by multinationals such as technology giants Intel and Google.

''If Ireland wants to produce high-paid, high-productivity jobs in the future we need state of the art IT infrastructure,'' says Jim Power, chief economist of financial services group Friends First.

The European Commission, which is urging more high-speed Internet use across the region, believes communities with faster communications enjoy more rapid employment and business growth.

Even in 1845, the men behind the first submarine cable between Britain and France wrote to British Prime Minister Robert Peel highlighting its potential to transmit ''messages of business etc, from merchants, brokers, tradesmen''.

On Valentia, 79-year-old Ring has little interest in the Internet but one thing he's clear on is that enterprising 19th-century engineers got things done faster.

''They built 30 miles of railway through mountain country in less than three years and the only thing they had the ancient Egyptians didn't was dynamite,'' he says, pointing out of his kitchen window to the nearby mainland and its disused railway.

He compares that to the recent straightening of one km of road: ''You should have seen the machines they had and still it took two and a half years. You wonder what goes on.'' Friends First's Power says such slow progress betrays a lack of political will: ''If I hear another politician describe us as a 'knowledge economy' I'm going to throw a brick through the television because we're not and we need to be.''

REUTERS