Eircom's recent thawing on the issue of allowing other broadband providers into its exchanges and the Government's announcement of the National Broadband Scheme all point to a future where anyone in Ireland who wants broadband will be able to get it.
And, while these advances are taking place at a national level, smaller wireless providers are not letting the grass grow under their feet and are bringing broadband to rural communities.
Last Mile Broadband, which has a licence to provide wireless services in the northern half of the State, this week launched its WiMax-based services in the midlands. Ultimately it plans to roll out WiMax broadband to more than 100 locations in 17 counties, including Cavan, Laois, Leitrim, Mayo, Monaghan and Roscommon.
Separately, Ice Broadband, founded by technology industry veteran Fran Rooney, has purchased Canopy wireless technology from Motorola, which operates in an unlicensed part of the radio spectrum.
Mr Rooney says that Ice, which already provides services in 30 towns around Ireland, will make broadband available in another 30 towns over the next six weeks.
He says that the company chose Motorola's proprietary Canopy technology primarily because it can be rolled out in rural towns in a matter of weeks.
"The problem is that everyone who is trying to roll out broadband is looking at wired technology, but the quality of the copper [in Eircom's network] is not good enough. What are you going to do? Dig up the whole country to provide broadband?"
In contrast, he says, Ice simply installs a relatively small radio antenna on a high point to provide coverage to a whole town. He says that the alternatives are more expensive mobile 3G technology or WiMax, which require "massive infrastructure investments".
John Gibbons, a director of Last Mile, admits that becoming the first service provider to deploy WiMax commercially has been a painful process, primarily because the technology is still maturing. The upside is that Last Mile's services are now based on an international standard. Next year Intel will start building WiMax capability into laptops as standard.
Although Canopy can be deployed more quickly and cheaply, Mr Gibbons remains unconvinced of its merits.
"Canopy operates in licence-exempt spectrum and is low power but also low range. But how can you provide quality of service on an unlicensed network? Anyone else can just come along in the morning, set up and put you out of business."
While the providers slug it out over which approach is better, Motorola happily sells both WiMax and Canopy technology.
Vincent Kennedy, director of Motorola Networks in Ireland, says he is seeing huge growth in Canopy, with seven or eight other regional providers, in addition to Ice, using the technology.
"For rural areas where there is no DSL or it does not reach, Canopy can win in both range and speeds," says Mr Kennedy. Canopy could be configured to provide different speeds to different subscribers on the same antenna - up to 14Mbit/sec.
Mr Gibbons says Last Mile guarantees speeds of 10MBit/sec to its WiMax customers and, crucially for rural areas, line of sight with the transmitter is not required.
