Up until now, most ISPs in Ireland have charged a flat rate for unlimited access via dial-ups. Only Esatclear has charged a per-minute access fee instead of a subscription. Oceanfree is offering free access at local rates.

The big question for Irish ISPs relates to the commercial threat that Oceanfree poses. In real terms, Oceanfree is not an Irish ISP. It is a localised version of the UK ISP LineOne. Irish localisation is provided by Webfactory and Volta, two Irish web design companies.

The page design for Oceanfree has been carried out by Webfactory and Volta has supplied a site review of various Irish interest sites. The webdesign is of the common or garden garish variety but Volta's site review has potential. It is rather pedantic in awarding points of out N for elements of the site under review but it is a lot more useful than the trite clueless reviews of Tinet's Doras effort and it is also easier to navigate.

However the true nature of the beast soon appears as most of the content for Oceanfree is actually that of LineOne. The news section contains the online editions of the UK's Express, Times and Sunday Times. What Oceanfree is pushing is a localised portal. The model of getting into a market, charging the customer the lowest price in order to push the competition out of the market is a classic Murdoch ploy. However the internet has a somewhat different economic model to satellite television or the newspaper business.

Irish ISPs have, in many cases, spent time in assembling their own content with a fraction of the resources available to LineOne. However many Irish users will probably continue to subscribe to the Irish ISPs while using Oceanfree for fast access for games. Ireland is not used to free ISPs yet so things will take some time to settle down. In any case, the Irish internet scene has been changed.

Of the Irish ISPs, Tinet is perhaps badly placed. It is the smallest of the big three and most of the content provision ventures are either clueless or ignored. Esatclear is pitching to a somewhat captive audience and it may be hit by the local call rate aspect in the off-peak period.

Other localised ISPs will fare better for the simple fact that they are localised. They, along with IOL, Indigo and Clubi have had time to grow a user culture. The local call rate access for Oceanfree will not endear it to business users. They will have to evaluate the situation: ISP subscription fee and the peak-rate costs of 7.5 minutes per unit versus no ISP subscription fee and peak rate costs of 3 minutes per unit. Unless the business spends a very small amount of time online, the current situation is the more economical of the two.