Eircom and Esat will compete for a three-year contract worth more than €18 million to connect all State schools to broadband services before October 2005.
Other firms that are likely to apply for parts of the contract are NTL, Smart Telecom and Irish Broadband, which have until August 24th to submit final bids.
A Government tender for the telecoms contract shows that the Government has set a deadline of September 30th, 2005 for the connection of all schools to broadband.
More than 4,000 primary and second-level schools should benefit from the scheme, which will enable schools to offer video conferencing, email and a range of other Web services to pupils.
The tender documents demonstrate that the State has reserved the right to offer the contract to several companies, rather than offering one single contract.
This reflects a shift in Government thinking following a decision to award a previous three-year State contract worth €130 million per year for all its telecoms to Eircom/Vodafone in 2002.
That deal has been criticised by the Minister for Communications, Mr Ahern, and the chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Mr O'Flynn, for undermining competition in Ireland.
The Department of Education, which is running the tender competition, will be able to use an €18 million fund provided by the telecoms industry and the Government to pay for services.
Eircom, Vodafone, Meteor, O2, Esat BT and a range of other telecoms operators have made contributions to the fund.
HEAnet, the State's existing education and research network, will manage a central broadband network on behalf of the Government.
This body already provides a high-speed national network with direct connectivity for more than 130,000 students and staff to other networks in Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world.
HEAnet will provide content management services and other security services for the proposed broadband network.
Different levels of broadband connectivity will be supplied to schools depending on their individual requirements.
The Government is seeking quotations for bandwidth of up to eight megabytes per second for large schools and a minimum of 512 kilobytes per second for small schools.
More than half of the 4,000 schools will need bandwidth of one megabyte per second.
The more broadband capacity a school is assigned, the more high-bandwidth applications it can access simultaneously over the internet.
The National Centre for Technology, the body that oversees technology use in Irish schools, will provide assistance to schools and teachers to use broadband.
