Esat Digifone has invested £2 million (€2.5 million) in a new mobile data software product which overcomes longstanding difficulties in offering high-speed Internet connections to mobile workforces.

At the moment laptop users can connect to the Internet and retrieve e-mail and other information using their mobile phones. But it is extremely slow. In a lot of cases mobile users prefer to wait until they can make a land line connection before sending or downloading information.

Esat's new EasyData product will allow users to send data up to three times faster than the existing GSM data service which only allows transmission speeds of 9.6 kilobits per second (kbps).

The software devised by British company Brand Communications compresses mobile data, including Excel, e-mail, Word and text files, and pushes it through the mobile network at speeds of up to 36 kbps.

Dial-up times to the service provider have also been significantly reduced from an average of 30 seconds to make a connection, to around eight seconds.

The software, which has been piloted for the last two months with Esat Corporate Private Network (CPN) clients, is about to be rolled out to 130 Siemens staff in the Republic. According to Mr Colin Coffey, product development projects manager at Esat Digifone, Dell Computer Ireland has also agreed to pilot the software.

Esat will install the software free on a laptop connected to an internal local area network with standard dial-up access. The user simply has to pass the mobile phone in front of the laptop's infrared port, or attach via cable, and the software automatically dials in to the DigiData service.

Because the call charge is now mobile to mobile instead of mobile to fixed, users save 71/2 pence per minute for data calls. Charges also only apply when data is being transmitted, and not for total time logged on.

Esat Digifone says the rapid call set up facility - reducing dial up times by up to 22 seconds - will bring set-up savings of around 60 per cent.

The software intelligently detects activity on the line, and automatically disconnects the call during down time, without logging out of the DigiData network.

Until now ending a mobile call connection to a laptop has tended to cause laptop applications to seize up, requiring the user to reboot. Now the call automatically reconnects once the user instructs the application to send or receive data.

There are no software licence charges to the client company, with the only likely charge being a possible instalment fee to a consultancy company.