The Government is planning to fund trials of a new technology that would enable consumers to access high speed internet services from power sockets, writes Jamie Smyth

It hopes the technology can be developed to offer direct competition to Eircom's local access network, which provides a telephone line to every Irish home.

Power line technology, which has already been implemented in pilot projects in Britain, the US and Germany, delivers broadband internet along electricity wires rather than telephone lines.

The technology can also be adapted by power companies to deliver a range of enhanced electric network services, such as meter reading, outage detection and power network monitoring.

Officials at the Department of Communications have contacted ESB with a view to establishing pilot projects in rural areas and around the Digital Hub facility.

The Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr Dermot Ahern, will meet senior ESB officials later this week to discuss the project.

"The ESB are very keen to look at the possibilities of technology in this area. If this were to be successful it would cure a lot of the issues to do with the last mile.

"It would also probably bring fairly significant resources to ESB," added Mr Ahern.

The British utility, Scottish Hydro is already offering high speed internet services over its electricity network in parts of Scotland and England. Its consumer broadband service offers users a two megabyte per second connection to the internet at £25 sterling, including VAT.

This compares favourably with the current cost of high speed internet services in the Republic, where Esat offers a digital subscriber line service at about €50. Eircom is planning to offer its own consumer services at a cost of €45, excluding VAT.

But digital subscriber line technology - which upgrades ordinary telephone lines to carry fast internet - has a limited range of about four kilometres from the nearest telephone exchange. This excludes many households from accessing broadband, especially in rural or remote areas.

Also, the slow pace of "unbundling the local loop" or opening incumbent telecoms networks to competition has also dampened the roll-out of high speed internet services over telephone wires.

This has prompted utilities across Europe to study the possibilities offered by powerline technology for revenue generation.

A survey by the research firm Gartner published in 2002 found that more than 20 power companies have set up trials of the technology in Europe, with others following in the US, South America, Australia and Asia.

The author of this report, Gartner analyst Mr Journi Forsman, concluded: "The technical problems that dogged early trials have now been ironed out, we believe. The way is now open for companies to retry, with a realistic chance of success."

But using electricity wires to deliver broadband is not an entirely new idea. In 1997, an energy firm, Norweb, and telecoms equipment company Nortel said they had found a way to make the technology work.

They set up a joint venture and embarked on a series of pilots. But the projects were never commecialised and interest in powerline technology diminished.

Although electricity wires are made of the same raw materials as phone wires - metal wire surrounded by insulation - sending internet data rather than electricity does pose problems with interference.

Electric current gives rise to electromagnetic radiation, creating "noise" that can drown out the data signal.

But proponents of powerline technologies believe these issues are now solved.