The coffee and tea may only just have been poured around the breakfast table in the Conrad Hotel and the croissants are as yet untouched, but industry analyst Mr David Rendell has already offered an entire menu full of provocative opinions on the European and Irish telecommunications markets.

Eircom's lack of vision causes the company to look for targets to blame instead of acting to resolve its problems. Europe will fail at deregulating its telecommunications sector unless it offers incentivising carrots as well as legislative sticks. Contrary to what the general public perceives, the market for fast, broadband Internet connectivity is dictated by over-abundance, not scarcity. And, the Republic should capitalise on being one of the world's few true information economies.

This is just a taste from Mr Rendell, vice-president of industry analysts Rendell and Associates and Gartner Consulting, whose pointed comments on the industry are widely sought after in the States.

Most recently, he has been advising international competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) on establishing alternative local service using wireless access technology.

He has been in Europe to talk to telecommunications companies and take the European industry's pulse and is particularly intrigued - or more precisely, bemused - by Eircom, which still dominates the Irish market.

"I understand Deutsche Telekom, I understand BT, but I don't understand Eircom," says the elegantly-spoken, Indian-born analyst, pouring himself a cup of tea. The company has failed to clearly articulate a new vision for itself as it has gone from State-owned asset to a public company, particularly in the case of what services it offers, and will offer, to the small business and home customer.

You can judge a telecommunications company by the treatment meted out to the small customer, he believes: "Corporations always find ways of getting things done as they want, but the common man doesn't have that ability."

The corporate customer simply threatens to switch suppliers, or to actually move operations out of the country entirely.

So, he says, with a brief laugh, service levels and access to bandwidth aren't usually a major problem. But on the other end? Do customers get lines serviced promptly? Are new access technologies like DSL (digital subscriber line) available? And most importantly, is there a clear system for assessing company performance and troubleshooting difficulties?

Eircom doesn't seem to have such a system in place, and thus cannot articulate a vision for the company, he says. "If your vision isn't focused, it becomes a nightmare, and you start concentrating on share prices and dividends," he says.

However, he thinks Europe as a whole fails on this account - in trying to redirect all the former state-owned telecommunications companies into a free market climate, the European Union hasn't offered any shaping framework or overall vision for how it wants competition to happen.

"Europe doesn't understand what deregulation means," Mr Rendell says, and the difficulties are rooted in the haphazard, poorly-defined, country by country approach to regulating the process. "The first problem is that we have anecdotal regulations. No one understands what a regulation is," he says with exasperation. "In such a system you go for the heads. And the heads keep rolling."

And the crux of the deregulation/regulation problem is that Europe wants to force, rather than encourage, deregulation, he says, which is causing the former state-owned telcos to dig their feet in and try to protect the markets they have, rather than expand offerings.

"You must have a carrot. Sticks aren't good enough. Europe is interested in introducing competition, but without introducing incentives to the incumbents," he says. "But competition is not going to improve service. It's incentives and regulations."

He points to the adoption of DSL, widely viewed as one of the most promising medium-term solutions to getting broadband connectivity at low cost to consumers and small businesses.

In the US, provision of DSL has been linked to unbundling the local loop - the process of opening up access to all competitors to the "last mile" of telephone wire that goes directly into a premises and which has, until now, been controlled by the primary telephone companies.

US regulators determined that unbundling would be done at certain price levels that meant that telecommunications companies couldn't make money unless they also offered DSL. In addition, local phone companies could supply more lucrative long-distance services if they treated competition fairly.

But Mr Rendell is sceptical about whether unbundling will ever bring real broadband connectivity to the consumer: "Unbundling is the retreading of old tyres," he says.

The broadband market as a whole comes in for some cynicism, too. There's a glut of supply in the broadband market, he says, with only 3 per cent of the bandwidth currently being laid in use, which creates an odd market ruled by abundance, not scarcity. But the general population sees broadband as a scarce market, because "the bottleneck is at the local loop".

Oversupply of bandwidth is driving suppliers to push for access to the local loop. But in turn, they need consumer pressure for this to happen. Thus we're hit with marketing campaigns that extol a future wonderworld of broadband connections.

"So now you have everyone talking about how bad the local loop is," he says. "Whenever there's oversupply, marketing becomes very creative. You've got to find innovative uses. The interesting question is, does demand follow supply, or supply follow demand?"

The Republic needs to make sure broadband connections operate on two levels: both providing direct and fast connectivity to the digital economic engine of the United States; and offering technological advancements for the nation 's people, especially children.

"Why? Those children are going to be part of the information age. They will be virtual emigrants," he says, adding that the Government should offer incentives to people to buy computers. Mr Rendell believes the State is one of the few with an economy and society in tune with the digital world. "Ireland has emerged from the ashes of the industrial age like a phoenix," he says. "Ireland is one of the few modern, information service economies," where the population is "more attuned not to a post-industrial economy but an information service economy. You can see the ability of a new generation of Irish to change things. There's a vision."

And then, we've come full circle: "When you see that vision, it's amazing that Eircom's not riding that wave." The potential is there, he believes. Like everyone else, he'll be interested to see what they do next.