The nature of the huge economic growth that Ireland has enjoyed for almost a decade has driven the major requirement for advanced high speed International telecommunications
capabilities.

Over 1,200 overseas companies have chosen Ireland as their European base and are involved in a wide range of activities in sectors as diverse as e-Business, engineering, information communications technologies, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, financial and international services.

The largest overseas investors have been American owned major multinationals. It is estimated that these companies control as much as 61% of Ireland's GDP. This economic success was brought about by Ireland's 3 key advantages, namely: a skilled and flexible workforce, one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world and the youngest and one of the best educated populations in Europe.

In today's harsh global economic environment, companies located in Ireland now face the critical task of competing against fellow subsidiaries in other countries by attracting more critical workloads to their operations. Moving further up their corporate value chain from a remote base will only be achieved by developing highly advanced low cost communications capabilities.

Such communications capabilities ensure the parent company maintains the same levels of controls, collaboration and information exchanges as if these tasks were being performed at their own headquarters in the US. They also achieve greater productivity by building 'follow the sun' shared working regimes, particularly for time critical research and development projects.

Ireland / USA communications used to be diverted across the Irish Sea into the UK, where they then transferred onto UK /USA cable systems. This placed Ireland at a great operational disadvantage as the speed (latency) of the network brought about by the physically longer route and time delays associated with switching across telecom systems. The effect of these delays meant that Ireland would be precluded from using many of the emerging CTI capabilities.

It is to answer this major economic requirement for highly advanced low cost telecommunications capabilities that Hibernia Atlantic invested so heavily in Ireland. Prior to Hibernia Atlantic's launch in 2003 there was no direct, modern, high capacity cable systems linking Ireland to the North American continent.

>Combined Trans-Atlantic Information Infrastruture

> Sharing of corporate files across the ocean

> Collaborative work group operations

> Broadcast quality video/ data/ voice communications

> Business continuity/ Disaster recovery

The Hibernia Atlantic system is connected by high capacity low cost local loop networks to over 500,000 square feet of available Data Centre space in Dublin. This presents an ideal opportunity for major US corporations to now locate their critical diverse IT operations centre her in Ireland. The low latency and costs of the Hibernia Atlantic network enables the constant mirroring of transaction data from North America / UK directly to Ireland.

This ensures that the organization will have all the latest information to resume critical business operations from Ireland with virtually no interruption to the information service.

The Direct Ireland USA communication breakthrough now effectively makes New York, Boston and Dublin ...one big city!

The Dublin International Exchange Center is the major interconnecting hub for Irish telecommunications service providers linking directly to the US, Canadian and the UK telecom market exchanges.