Comreg in 3G Cloud Cuckoo Land

spongebob

Last week the Chair of Comreg , John Doherty, said the following about the availability of 3G services in Ireland from the 3 companies who are licenced to provide them.

" We had four characteristics that we wanted to measure, and in our view the operators are compliant with those. One is that the networks are switched on, which they are. Another is that services are available, tariffs are published and customer service is available. Under the headings of those criteria, which were set out in the original licence arrangement, they are compliant with all of those arrangements."

Intruiged at Dohertys assurances that Ireland had joined the 3G age I therefore rang O2 and had a most intruiging conversation with the allegedly 'available' Customer Service which simply does not exist as it turns out.

O2 stated that the 3G service DOES NOT exist as there is NO BILLING SYSTEM of any kind in place for it yet. O2 COULD NOT STATE when the service will be 'available' , either the 3G or the billing bits. If Comreg actually RANG them they would hear as much themselves. They got a rather jittery when pressed about the unavailable Billing System and wittered on about testing the network.

I feel I should tell the Chairperson of Comreg, lest he read this, that a Per Minute or Per Message Telecommunications Service can not be provided without a Billing System. The rest of the story and the original comment quoted above is on Silicon Republic . It actually gets worse and more unreal after the quoted bit.

Jeez , I'd nearly want Etain back after reading all that

M

crawler

That's great - and they want to allocate MORE of the 2.5Ghz spectrum for this as a 3G expansion band - ha!

Moriarty

Moved to Nets/Comms.