Smart Telecom's offering is faster than DSL, writes Jamie Smyth, Technology Reporter

Working with computers at St James's Secondary School in the Liberties is about to get a whole lot more interesting for 15-year-old student Kenneth Fitzpatrick .

He and his friend, Michael O'Connell (14), have been using computers for years, mostly for playing games, typing and looking up some internet sites.

But connecting to the internet from the school's designated computer room has been a frustrating process up until this week as the ISDN connection couldn't offer enough speed to serve a class.

"It was often too slow to download websites and we couldn't do much while we were waiting for them to appear on the screen," says Fitzpatrick. "I'm keen to download stuff from the Web and it takes a long time to get songs or games from the Web."

This all changed earlier this week as St James's benefited from the first commercial deployment of powerline broadband technology by Smart Telecom.

The telecoms firm is spending €250,000 to roll out high-speed internet services to 16 schools in the Liberties area of Dublin as part of the Liberties Learning Initiative run by the Digital Hub.

St James's is the first of the schools to get the new powerline carrier technology, which pumps internet data and telephone signals through the ordinary electricty network in the buildings.

The powerline technology does not require a phone network to provide broadband to each desktop computer, instead it uses the electricity sockets in school buildings to pipe the internet directly into classrooms.

"One of the big advantages of the new powerline technology is that it enables students and teachers to connect to the internet from their classrooms rather than from a designated computer room," says Mr Willie O'Brien, principal at St James's.

Teachers will now be using the internet in their classes and can easily share the powerline broadband modems between their different class rooms. These will also offer much faster connections and enable us to link with other schools online, he says.

For most of the 16 schools in the project, which is being supported by Smart Telecom and Diageo, this will be their first installation of broadband - a technology which generally offers users access to the internet at speeds up to 10 times faster than normal dial-up internet modems.

One of the major benefits of the powerline technology is that it offers download and upload speeds of up to 4.5 megabytes per second - more than eight times faster than the standard consumer DSL connection offered by the major telephone firms.

"This is real broadband we are talking about here," says Mr Oisin Fanning, chief executive of Smart Telecom, who is bankrolling much of the capital cost of the schools broadband project.

Surfing the Web on a lap-top hooked up to the electricity socket in their classroom, the two St James's students, Kenneth Fitzpatrick and Michael O'Connell, notice the difference immediately. "It can take 10 minutes to download a single song using a normal internet connection but broadband means you can do it in a single minute," says Fitzpatrick.

Teachers are unlikely to allow students to download games or music, but there are plenty of other more educational activities that need broadband, according to Mr Jim Fagan, director of Agtec, the Irish sub-contractor that is installing the powerline technology for Smart Telecom.

"This broadband will not just offer access to the internet but should in the future enable major e-learning projects to be implemented by the schools.

"The broadband network provided by the powerline project for the schools will also act as a platform that will enable schools to communicate between themselves. This will enable teachers and students to share resources and ideas online," adds Mr Fagan.

Because ESB has not yet opened up its own network for powerline technologies, Smart Telecom has used a combination of fibre and wireless to beam data to a receptor on the school's roof.

The company is connecting its own metropolitan fibre network in Dublin to the Digital Hub's own broadband network. It then uses a microwave radio link to beam data to the roof of schools, from which the signal is fed into the buildings' electricity network.

Agtec is using hardware and software developed by the Swiss firm Ascom, which is one of two big global firms that are pioneering in the field of powerline carrier technology. The other is the Israeli company, Mainnet.

The installation of powerline technology into a school is relatively easy and actually much quicker than installing a fibre network throughout a building. A control box, called a Power School, which contains all the software required to enable data to flow along an electricity wire, is built into the main switchboard of the school. It is connected inductively to the general services cables in the switchboard from which all the ordinary 13 amp sockets are fed via the local distribution fuseboard.

Installation of the entire powerline system can take as little as one hour and requires none of the extensive cabling associated with deploying fibre-optic networks. This provides major benefits for schools and takes the hassle out of installing broadband in schools, says Mr Fagan.

Ascom's powerline technology has already been deployed in several schools in Germany and the firm has received expressions of interest from about 2,000 schools. Hotels and listed buildings are also a target for powerline firms because it is a cheap way to provide broadband to many rooms without the need to lay telephone cables throughout the building.

Extending the use of powerline technology into the national electricity network owned by ESB is more controversial. ESB is conducting trials of the technology in Tuam but has yet to release any details of the results.

If these trials prove successful it would enable ESB to provide broadband direct to consumers' homes without using Eircom's local loop. This potentially could completely change the economics of telecommunications, and threaten telecoms operators.

Agtec's Mr Fagan remains skeptical that ESB is really committed to pushing powerline technology in the Republic. But other European and US firms are conducting similar trials and commercial deployment is possible.

It is certainly possible that by the time students such as Kenneth Fitzpatrick and Michael O'Connell grow up, powerline technology will have expanded beyond single-building deployments to encompass whole districts and even some Irish cities.