"In California waiting for Web pages to download is a thing of the past. Everyone I know has two megs bandwidth at home now; I just click and - whoosh - the pages are there." We may be talking about broadband Internet access in Ireland, but in the US getting two megabits per second into your home is already a reality, according to the vice-president of a Californian Internet software company who recently visited here.

Although cable companies may have eliminated the worldwidewait for many US users, home and small-business users in Ireland are still plodding along at comparatively puny speeds of up to 64 kilobits per second using modems and ISDN lines. The best we can hope for in the short term is flat-rate access, but there are signs that 1999 may be the year in which we shift up a gear or two.

In the race to provide faster access, cable companies are stealing a march on deregulated telephone companies, providing not just alternative phone lines but broadband Internet access for a fixed monthly price. Faced with such competition, telephone companies are looking towards a technology which delivers broadband speed over the existing copper wires which run into most homes and businesses.

That technology, called ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) took a small but significant step forward last month when a preliminary standard for its modems was agreed by the International Telecommunications Union, avoiding a repeat of last year's long battle for a 56-kbps modem standard. Realising they had lost ground to cable modems, the telephone companies could not afford to delay this technology.

So what will ADSL bring users? Like cable modems it offers "always on" connectivity, meaning users need not make a connection before surfing the Web or exchanging email. For this they will pay a fixed sum per month, which the ADSL Forum, a body set up to promote the technology (www.adsl.com), admits will be more expensive than low-speed network access. The advantage of ADSL resides in value-added rather than reduced costs, according to a report compiled by the University of Southern California for the forum.

Like cable modems, ADSL offers megabits per second download speeds, although upload speeds are much slower (hence the term asymmetric). This, however, is not a serious disadvantage since most Internet applications download much more data than they upload.

So, when will we see it? Telecom Eireann plans to start ADSL trials in Ennis towards the end of this month. This will provide Internet download speeds of 384 kbps, and video download speeds of 4 Mbps, fast enough to receive a 1 1/2 hour video in five to 10 minutes, according to Telecom Eireann.

This pilot scheme will be extended to Kilkenny, Castlebar and Killarney during the first half of 1999, prior to full commercial launch. "We have yet to look at prices," said a Telecom Eireann spokesman, but the company would aim to offer prices similar to those in the US and Europe. A cheaper version offering similar Internet speed but a maximum of 1.5 Mbps, called ADSL lite, will be simultaneously introduced.

International ADSL prices are in the region of £350 to £400 per month. British Telecom, for example, is conducting trials in London for a 2 Mbps service costing around £420 sterling per month. A product announcement was expected in early October, but BT deferred it. It is believed it has a couple of customers already, probably home offices (or SOHOs - small office/home offices - as they're now known), but the company is said to be concerned that sufficient customers may not be ready or willing to pay for two megabit access. In a chicken-and-egg scenario, the telephone companies are worried that there may not be enough data demand to justify megabit links to homes. Pundits argue that sufficient bandwidth will generate new applications to fill it, and applications like video-on-demand and Internet video and audio streams would seem to prove them right. However, Internet service providers are also worried: offering megabit links to houses puts the bottleneck spotlight on them.

But, as ever, the US is giving the lead. It is estimated that with 23 million US households currently online, some 500,000 people are using cable modems at 1.5 Mbps. Analysts predict cable modems will significantly outnumber ADSL connections within four years, although the ADSL forum is understandably less enthusiastic. One study it cites predicts 5.5 million European homes using some form of DSL line by 2002, while another predicts 19.1 million cable modems in Europe by 2005.

With Cablelink up for sale very soon, and other cable companies already offering or planning Internet access, telephone companies here have to respond. The Telecom Eireann spokesman readily agreed ADSL will compete with the cable industry. The battle hasn't yet begun in earnest, but the combatants have chosen their weapons.

Eoin Licken is at elicken@irish- times.ie