Six companies have taken up the full initial offering of high-speed, international broadband telecommunications capacity available from the Government on the Global Crossing transatlantic fibre-optic cable, which went live last Friday. Another four are pre-qualified for a far more limited second offering of connectivity on the cable, which is capable of handling 30 million simultaneous telephone calls.

The six companies, revealed at a launch event yesterday, are Eircom, AboveNet, Connect Intelligence, WorldPort, Irish Multichannel and Formus Communications. The four companies pre-qualified for any second offering of remaining capacity are Stentor, WorldCom, Ocean and RTE Commercial Enterprises. The deal effectively reshuffles the Republic's telecommunications market and creates new international operators. Current prices for broadband connections are expected to drop by up to a factor of 10.

The cable was a public private partnership deal designed to bring a major supplier of broadband connections into the State. In an unusual arrangement, the Government then bought just more than half the total capacity on the cable and offered it at an extremely low price of £5 million (€6.35 million) for 12 high-capacity lines, which analysts estimate to be about one-fifth the current retail rate.

Global Crossing will also offer some of the remaining capacity to the market.