Bermuda CableVision has reopened discussions with the Ministry of Telecommunications in a bid to receive its own licence to provide Internet service.

At the same time, the company which was earlier this year granted a licence to act as a common carrier for ISPs, has decided to hold off from providing that service.

General manager Jeremy Elmas said: "The thing the customer is interested in is access to the Internet.

"The real strength of the cable network is the speed at which we could offer services. Up until recently, the fastest speed available was about 512 k which is slow by cable standards.

"Transact is the first to get into the market and offer a one megabyte service which is starting to make it a look a little more interesting, but that was a big reason we held off from starting to offer that [carrier service.

"We didn't think just hopping out there and competing on a price differential with BTC on their DSL line would do much to move people to our network without control over the end user product."

Mr. Elmas said that in light of his company's concern over such things as the slow speed of current service ? his company's network has the ability to provide customers with speeds of 2-5 megs and even higher ? Bermuda CableVision is doing two things.

"We are working on scheduling meeting between ISPs and ourselves in order to discuss what the best way to introduce this product to the market would be and we have been in discussions with ministry for the past couple months regarding trying to obtain an internet licence ourselves. There is a Moratorium on the issuance of licences currently but given the fact that we have approached them about offering speeds of two megabytes and higher at much lower prices, I'm not saying they are necessarily going to do anything about it, but we felt that would be one of the avenues to go down to make sure that if we decided to make the investment to make data available over our network that we would be able to recover a return."

Mr. Elmas says that his company does not see a "good market plan" in just providing point to point service at the present time.

"If the ISPs choose to come up with a different market mix that would drive end users to our platform in some fashion that would give CableVision comfort that an investment in data services would end up being profitable."

CableVision can act as a carrier for Internet access through the co-axial and fibre optic lines currently providing cable television to customers' homes.

As for the prices, Mr. Elmas hesitated to say how much his company would charge for access to high speed Internet through its cable modem service.

"It is like comparing apples and organises because BTC provides DSL which adds phone service which we wouldn't be.

"I don't want to offer a direct comparison but the price range we have been looking at for providing the point-to-point service would be in the $30-$40 ranger per month," he said.