Dundalk company Digiweb is developing its own mobile broadband service that will directly compete with the 3G offerings from Vodafone, O2 and Three Ireland. But instead of paying a considerable sum to get a coveted 3G licence or suing Comreg as Eircom had to do to get theirs . . . disclaimer: Digiweb recently invited me to give a talk to its employees and paid my travel expenses to get there . . .

Digiweb instead snapped up the old frequencies that the Irish 088 mobile service ran on.

Now it is rolling out wireless broadband on those frequencies, in a way terraforming dormant spectrum that nobody saw a use for.

Digiweb is the first in the world to do this and has also been granted a licence in Norway to do the same. Now many other companies worldwide have started following the Digiweb model and will be rolling out mobile broadband services on old GSM spectrum at a fraction of what it cost the 3G providers to acquire 3G licences.

The drawback of being so new is that Digiweb had to design the data modems to work on these 088 frequencies and then have them manufactured. To bring down costs, though, Digiweb is sharing all these designs and testing data with other companies around the world that are moving into this space.

The intention is that, the more companies that roll out this technology, the cheaper the broadband modems will become.

Cubic Telecom in Cork has released a mobile phone with a special sim that allows you to add more than one number to your mobile phone. The phone can also connect to wireless networks. With multiple phone numbers, when you travel a lot, you can assign a UK number to the phone for UK customers and an Irish number for people in Ireland to call you, and all calls will go to a single phone.

While the EU talked up its battle with mobile providers to cut the cost of roaming in the EU, in reality all they got was a slight discount for most travellers and only in the EU.

The Cubic phone routes calls over the internet to local numbers in the country you are roaming in, and then connects the person to you seamlessly. People still pay to call you but only at their local rates; you too have to still pay for incoming calls but at a discounted rate. However, if your phone is in range of a wireless network, incoming calls are routed over that network to your phone for free and if the caller is also on Cubic using Wifi, their calls are free.

The potential for this is that eventually we will see a global flat rate to phone anywhere on the planet from a mobile without using the existing providers. If the Cubic phone takes off, it will start a telecoms revolution.

The genius of both services is not in the intellectual property generated to make the services work but in the vision in combining a lot of existing and developing technologies into new services which can be rapidly deployed.

There are enough raw ingredients in the technology world to be the next Google or Skype but Ireland seems to be obsessed with focusing our energy in spending five years developing IP to then sell on to someone else. If Cubic and Digiweb reach their potential, perhaps this mindset will change?