NET RESULTS: Imagine you are a senior executive with a large multinational technology company (now, now; stop (i) gloating, or (ii) looking so scared). You've arrived in Dublin to have a word with Government officials and other relevant parties about situating your European headquarters in the Republic.

If the US executive board says Yes to this proposal, it will create hundreds of jobs, inject taxes from all those higher-end salaries into the economy and give the Republic another tech feather in its cap.

You've been talking to IDA Ireland out in California, and you've been reading some of the international press on the Irish business environment, and you know the impressive list of tech companies working out of the Republic.

Great, you think; lots of possibilities for sourcing supplies nearby; lots of opportunity to hire those science and business-educated Irish students; all in all, sounds like the perfect tech business climate.

Then, sitting in your hotel room, you pull out the laptop to get some work done.

You're staying in one of the best hotels in Dublin but you can't seem to find an ethernet jack - the little plug for your computer that puts you right on to the hotel's high-speed internal internet network. Your wireless card inside your laptop doesn't detect a wireless network, either.

In some disbelief (this is, after all, supposed to be an e-business hub for Europe - that's what the IDA guy told you many times), you connect to the plain old phone line and dial in to the internet.

The process seems incredibly slow - so slow, indeed, that you start remembering your early days in the industry when a 14.4 bit per second modem was the norm. You get almost misty-eyed - until you check your connection speed and see that you are barely scraping along at 28.8.

My God, that's a speed you haven't seen in years, and you're sure something must be wrong.

You call the front desk. No-one is really sure quite what you are talking about, so you get the manager on the line. She at least knows what bps speeds are but she says you're getting the usual speed for the hotel and for most other hotels as well.

That's the point at which you begin to doubt all the optimistic blather you've had from the IDA, from Government officials, from local authorities and from the newspaper articles.

Right. So the capital city of this e-business oriented state doesn't seem to have wireless or ethernet or even reasonably fast dial-up internet access in its hotels. And it wants to charge you through the teeth for your piddly little line, which is so slow that you're likely to have to leave the thing on downloading your email all day. Forget about Web surfing!

Fine. Not a great first impression of the place, but you'll make a few calls to the telecommunications operators to find out some basic costs for high-speed access for your proposed company headquarters.

You were thinking of somewhere outside Dublin - you just can't believe the traffic here, even though you're a veteran of California freeway commutes, and you don't want to have to deal with that tangle every day - but the five areas you inquire about apparently don't have any broadband internet access at all, and there is no hope of getting any within the next couple of years.

So you start to think about the possibility of two centres. That's what Dell does, for example, with its Bray call centre and its manufacturing centre down in Limerick. But when the telecom guy tells you the cost for a high-speed internet link between the two offices, you are staggered. Man, you can run a line from Dublin to San Jose for less than that!

Time for a coffee downstairs, then, and a read of the papers. You read about traffic snarls and delays to public transport projects, and dropping rates of science graduates.

You read that the Government wants those telecoms companies you just spent all that time talking to, to store three years of data about the phone and mobile and fax calls, emails, and Web use by your company. What? They wouldn't dare do that in the States. The US executive board isn't going to care for that.

You start thinking about what you are going to tell them during the conference call with American HQ tomorrow. Things are looking a bit different to what they'd all expected, you think.

So you make a call to that helpful government official in Prague. You may not be in Ireland quite as long as you expected. Can they get you a good hotel room for Friday? Yes?

See you then.

Karlin's tech weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/