The coverage of E-commerce in the press has a lot in common with the activity of lemmings. Any project, no matter how outrageous, is taken up like some battle flag - regardless of whether it has a hope of making money or not. This clueless charge is due to the passing acquaintance with technological and fiscal reality that some "technology journalists" seem to have. As others read the guff, a new group of what can only be described as "E-jits" is created. For these people,  the internet created a wonderful new "caring" economy complete with reheated New Age bull about how making money is irrelevant. 

If you have paid attention to the press over the last few years, you will have seen what a wonderful job the government, and the telcos  have been doing regarding the internet. Ireland was meant to be an "E-commerce hub". Acres of press space were devoted to that telling us how wonderful the future would be. A future so bright that we'd have to wear shades. Unfortunately for us, it was the people who were writing about  this E-commerce hub that were wearing the shades - the ones with the mirrors on the insides. And then there is ADSL. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line.

Not too long ago, Ireland wallowed in the shadow of a monopoly telco. The fastest speed available to the users was ISDN and even that was hard to get in some areas. One post on the an Irish newsgroup last year complained how the poster had been waiting for about seven months for ISDN to be installed. ISDN could have been quite a money spinner for Eircom if it had been marketed effectively. The technology is old but effective. However a combination of ridiculously high priced installation and bumbling marketing and the impact of real world technology meant that ISDN was never successful for Eircom. Since V.90 modems became common, paying Eircom's exorbitant installation costs for ISDN was not necessary. V.90 is not as good as ISDN but it is cheaper - and in the market, the cheaper product tends to win.

There was no real competition for the state monopoly telco, Telecom Eireann, as it was then. Cable modems were largely a glint in a PR person's eye. When HackWatch ran the news about ADSL being tested in Dublin on 31/10/1998, the story was that ADSL would be rolled out within the next year. The test was limited to a few TE employees - an obvious waste of resources in the eyes of the bandwidth starved masses. After a while, the programme was extended so that a select few could test ADSL. Of course  the chosen had to be in Dublin and clustered around a few exchanges. The last that anyone heard of ADSL was when Eircom.net amended its DNS records to include what appeared to be a few ADSL routers and apparently a few people in Eircom's Information Age town have it.

In July 1998, Cablelink had announced at a press conference that it would be introducing cable modem access. The public could not wait - a real competitor to Telecom Eireann? No - there is still no sign of Cablelink's cable modem access but a test programme has been completed. According there will be a deployment of cable modem access in Dublin in the second quarter of this year. No date was available for the rest of the nets though. According to some sources, considerable money has been put aside to develop the nets outside of Dublin. With Cablelink's sale last year and its removal from that constellation of state owned companies, there is a possibility that both cable modem access and cable telephony will occur before the end of the year.

A recent announcement that Eircom had concluded a deal with Newbridge Communications could be good for internet users. Apparently this deal valued at $16 Million would have Newbridge supplying Eircom with DSL, Digital Subscriber Line, technology. Apparently Eircom want to introduce this technology to all its 1.6 million customers within the first year of it being rolled out. This assumes that it will still have 1.6 million customers. The onslaught from the newly taken over Esat and the cable companies will probably reduce that figure. However if Eircom finally does get its act together,  DSL is a superior technology to that used on cable networks.

So without the benefits of fast connections and wide bandwidth, the average internet user in Ireland may not see much of a difference until the latter part of this year. Commercial transactions on the net will still go on as they have been doing for some years now. The biggest development in electronic commerce will be the mobile aspect.

Have you ever tried to buy a 100 unit phone card recently? Technology moves towards simplicity. If something is not user friendly, then the user doesn't bother using it or at least will use it grudgingly. Carrying around pockets full of coins wore out pockets and when the card phones appeared, it became simpler to purchase a phone card with a number of units available. The widespread marketing of mobile phones has made the phonecard payphones largely irrelevant. The mobiles are easier to use and they make it easier for the user. WAP enabled phones may be about to change the face of mobile phones but thinking that it will be in the same manner as an extension of the internet replete with bloatware pages is wrong.  On the WWW, pages have become bloated with hidden comments, graphics and applets - it is as if they are expanding to fill all available space and memory like some poorly written piece of software.

WAP is a bandwith-poor medium. It automatically forces the people creating the services and content to be innovative. It is effectively like the internet before the advent of a connection that was fast enough to allow graphics. In this medium the content is not everything - it is the only thing. Unfortunately some of the people in the telcos working on this new medium were not on the internet before the WWW and they also have very little experience in publishing such text based services.

Most technological revolutions start out trying to share ground with the previous one and end up creating their own niche. WAP phones  are in some senses trying to imitate the previous revolution - access to the world wide web. The mobile phone population is mobile - trying to browse the web and walk would be beyond some mobile phone users and it ignores what WAP enabled phones are exceedingly good for - supplying small personalised bits of information.

The main sellers on WAP phones will be information services  such as directory enquiries or restaurant or cinema listings. Throw in the possibility of being able to make bookings and pay for tickets and WAP becomes effectively a text based community among mobile phone users. And as such community sites such as bulletin board services will provide the glue for this net. Esat has already begun to move in this direction. Eircom is largely playing catch-up since the Esat acquisition of some entertainment guides last year is ideally suited to providing the kind of information that WAP needs to boost its take up. The other thing of course is a the availability of cheap WAP phones. 

Given the speed at which the mobile phone market moves, and the cut-throat competition, there is a possibility that much of the mundane E-commerce that takes place in Ireland over the next few years will take place via WAP phones.

It is open to question whether Ireland will be an "E-Commerce hub" with the modern equivalent of a chicken in every pot - high speed internet connectivity for everyone this time next year.  No doubt the politicians and the E-jits will be claiming that the promised land will be happening real soon now.