Ireland soccer team manager Mr Mick McCarthy may be a self-confessed computer "ignoramus", as he noted when he appeared on Indigo's behalf at Dun Laoghaire's St George Yacht Club yesterday, but that made him an entirely appropriate choice to introduce the company's free Internet service, gofree.

In the turbulent Internet access market, getting as many subscribers online on your service has become the next - mostly unproved - business model. With only 13 per cent or so of Irish people using the Internet, according to estimates, and the Net becoming more mainstream, technical neophytes and non-Net users like McCarthy are just the people the Internet Service Providers (ISP) would like to nudge online.

However, no one is sure what will happen next, after the subscribers are there. What's clear is that once computer company Gateway and communications company Ocean entered the Irish ISP market with free access last June, they changed it irrevocably, pushing it into its next phase of development.

With existing margins already shaved to the bone, ISPs hope that a large audience will enable them to raise revenue through advertising and electronic commerce ventures. Getting and keeping "eyeballs" by providing free Net access coupled to interesting content on the ISP's website is now the name of the game.

That's certainly why Indigo's gofree, unlike other free access services in Ireland, offers only one email address per customer - but allows a person sign up for as many separate accounts as are wanted. That makes the subscriber base - calculated by numbers of accounts - look as large as possible.

Both operators may well be pondering the very successful initial public offering last Monday of shares in Freeserve, the British ISP and spin-off of electronics retailer Dixons. Freeserve was first to market with the free access idea - and initially ridiculed. Now, they've reshaped the European ISP market and, in the process, created some of Europe's first Internet millionaires.