It's A Two Horse Race For Meteor

SparkyLarks

But if compeditor B continues to make calls and lots of them at that price, why should the suplier drop his prices? A price that enough people are willing to pay to counter the effect of the minority that are not.

Grow up, kids

Oscar and Sparky, I'm not disagreeing with either of you. There may be scope to drop prices, and I'm sure prices will fall. My beef wasn't with profits, it was with the claim made about prices. I just wanted to lay to rest the original false claim that Ireland had the most expensive mobile calls in Europe. It doesn't.

eircomtribunal

Grow up, kids wrote:

I just wanted to lay to rest the original false claim that Ireland had the most expensive mobile calls in Europe. It doesn't.

You have not laid to rest the claim that Ireland is "one of the most expensive countries for pre-paid mobile telephony".

The table you mocked

That means nothing. Anyone can base a graph on selective figures - you could do it and make Ireland look like one of the cheapest. Ireland is in the upper bracket alright, no doubt about it, but if you look at it in terms of our income, it's one of the cheapest.

are the official OECD basket tables (and there are two more with similar results for low usage and high usage baskets). While you've a valid point about also looking at the PPP adjusted table (taking account of the purchasing power of different countries, where Ireland's mobile costs – was that inclusive of prepaid? – are in the middle field), this does not devaluate the absolute tables.

Your claim that Ireland has one of the cheapest mobile costs is baseless.

Whether we call it rip-off or use ComReg's vocabulary that the market is not functioning and regulatory intervention is needed is a personal matter.

P.

Grow up, kids

eircomtribunal wrote:

You have not laid to rest the claim that Ireland is "one of the most expensive countries for pre-paid mobile telephony".

Learn to read. The original post was this:

Originally Posted by zuma
We will still be paying the most in Europe(as usual) for mobile calls no matter what happens!!!

That is the claim that was untrue.

eircomtribunal wrote:

Your claim that Ireland has one of the cheapest mobile costs is baseless.

Where did I claim this?

eircomtribunal

Grow up, kids wrote:

Learn to read.

Thanks for the friendly advice.

Where did I claim this?

Here.

..if you look at it in terms of our income, it's one of the cheapest.

Even if we would only take into account the PPP adjusted OECD table which you later posted, it does not back up your claim that in these terms Ireland is one of the cheapest.
In the PPP adjusted OECD basket comparison Ireland is middle field, in the three absolute OECD mobile basket comparison tables (for low, medium and high usage), of which I posted one, Ireland's mobile operator tariffs are in top places.
P.

eircomtribunal

SparkyLarks wrote:

But if compeditor B continues to make calls and lots of them at that price, why should the suplier drop his prices? A price that enough people are willing to pay to counter the effect of the minority that are not.

Problem is, SparkyLarks, that the competitor A of the example is non-existent in Ireland. He's busy in Denmark etc, where the regulator is not ComReg.
P.

SparkyLarks

I'm not saying that mobile calls in Ireland are cheap.

But it can't be too expensive as loads of people are happy to pay it. In ireland we are crap at shopping round. We just do the easiest thing.

remember not buy anything day, or whatever it was called. Greece and italy almost shut down as I recall Ireland was buisness as usual.

I pal of min he's in his late 30's said the other day you know tesco is really about half the price as centra.

I don't blame the mobile companies. If I was CEO of vodafone I'd do the exact same thing, keep raising prices till usage drops. But in Ireland we just keep paying and complaining.

Any company comming into the market will offer reduced prices but they won;t reduce them that much as it's not in their long term intrest.

damien

SparkyLarks wrote:

I'm not saying that mobile calls in Ireland are cheap.

But it can't be too expensive as loads of people are happy to pay it. In ireland we are crap at shopping round. We just do the easiest thing.

What mindless drivel, by that same "logic" you can say petrol is not expensive, neither is alcohol, in fact with that "logic" once something is consumed it cannot be classed as expensive and not good value for money. So, you are all for punishing the consumer because they don't complain enough?

Mobiles for some are not an expensive luxury but a necessity that is expensive. I don't recall even ComReg using such a foolish argument and they really are good at making up almost plausible excuses for why we are being utterly ripped off and robbed by some telcos in this country. "Ah sure people are paying for it so it can't be that much of a ripoff, if they didn't want to pay so much they would stop using it." That's almost good enough for a report.

Grow up, kids

damien.m wrote:

What mindless drivel, by that same "logic" you can say petrol is not expensive

Petrol is expensive, but again, it's fairly reasonable compared to other European prices.

Currently the UK, Holland, France, Belgium and many others are more expensive. Yes, I know there are nations where it costs less than half that. Go live there.

Sparky is right, people are paying for what is a non-essential service, therefore it's not too expensive. And yeah, a few of you are gonna say 'I can't live without my mobile'. Yes you can. You just choose not to. Maybe there are some professions that require them, but most don't require it. Students don't. Kids don't. Yet they choose to pay for the service. You choose to pay for the service. If it were really too expensive for you, you'd do without it. You'd boycott it. But you don't. If you did, operators would have no choice but to drop their costs. But you pay for it because it's affordable, and you complain about it because that's what Irish culture has become. We are a nation of complainers. For the right reasons occasionally, but rather than doing anything about it, we just complain 1 minute, and use our phones the next.

Blaster99

There's nothing special about Irish people in terms of complaining or consuming. What is special is the lack of competition in most walks of life and rampant anti-competitive behaviour that is never punished by useless regulators and/or consumer protection agencies.

JTMan

dahamsta wrote:

I was commenting that it's incredible/admirable that Eircell was (it appears) first to market with such an innovative and ultimately hugely successful product. Not the technology, the product.

BIG TIME ... PAYG was an Irish Idea ? Did we really do it before One 2 One (now T-Mobile) in the UK ? Anyone know who came up with the idea in Eircell ?

paulm17781

Orange did it before Eircell.

Cryos

paulm17781 wrote:

Orange did it before Eircell.

Orange and one2one i think were the first to do it then eircell and the rest followed

eircomtribunal

In today's Sunday Times there's an article about the eircom-meteor deal etc.

...The Meteor chalice will require a degree of polishing. The stock market has already had its say — the Eircom share price slid 11% on the news of the deal. The Davy analysts Jack Gorman and Barry Gallagher called the €420m Meteor purchase from US group Western Wireless “expensive, absolutely and relatively”...

The ability of Eircom quickly to snatch lucrative post-paid or contract customers from Vodafone and O2 will define the success or failure of the transaction. It has promised 20% tariff cuts. “We have the Ryanair of the pre-paid market, Meteor is the low-cost network,” said O’Reilly. “Our aim in post-paid is not to preserve the average revenue per user (Arpu) of O2 and Vodafone. We are going to be aggressive.”

P.

Solair

Eircell launched in 1985 with only 20 staff and 5000 customers. (The UK networks launched in 1984)

Ready to Go prepay launched in 1997
(Vodafone UK claim's to have launched a similar service in the UK a few months earlier)

Ready to Go, was one of the first though that's for sure.

None of these network operators would have developed prepay. I'm pretty sure you'll find it was developed by Ericsson as an add on for the mobile version of the AXE switching system that processes your calls. So, once the technology became available, those networks would have simply bought it off-the-shelf. It's pretty similar to the kind of stuff that was already handling prepayed telephone cards for international calls at the time.

Interesting factoid: Here are the original Eircell tarrifs in 1985 at launch: bare in mind it wasn't even a seperate company at this stage, but rather a service offered by Telecom Eireann.
It offered international roaming on Vodafone's TACS network in Northern Ireland and the UK via some special arrangement.

National calls cost 10.7p per 20 seconds or part thereof (peak)
and 10.7p per 30 seconds off peak.

Or, to destinations where Subscriber Trunk Dialling isn't yet available!
96.3p for the first three minutes or part thereof (minimum) and thereafter at the rate of 32. 1p per minute or part thereof

(yes, in 1985 there were still some parts of rural ireland with manual service!)

Last Step-by-Step (oldest form of electromechanical switching system... pretty primative stuff) exchange shut in 1989 (Clontarf)

Last Step-By-Step in the UK : september 1995

Last manual exchange:
May 28th 1987 - Mountshannon, County Clare - Went straight over to digital.

(In the UK)
Last Manual exchanges:
London : 1970
England: 1975
UK: 1976 (Isle of Skye)

USA: 1982 (Maine)
Australia: 1991 (Wanaaring NSW)

So rural Ireland wasn't really much more backward than rural anywhere else ... Just a lot of places conveniently forget that even though Sydney might have been ultra modern there were places not too far away still using turn-handle phones

I think however, that some of the lagging behind that happened in the 1970s and 80s with PSTN upgrading is simply being repeated horribly with broadband now. It's well worth reviewing some of the history of that period of time and contrasting it with the nonsense that's going on now.

Blaster99

Pre-pay, great idea. You pay more for the phone, you pay more for the calls, and you have to pay up front. Why does it not surprise me that this was invented by a company owned by Telecom Eireann.

paulm17781

Blaster99 wrote:

Pre-pay, great idea. You pay more for the phone, you pay more for the calls, and you have to pay up front. Why does it not surprise me that this was invented by a company owned by Telecom Eireann.

It wasn't, it was invented by Ericsson! Eircell were 4th or 5th to use it.

Solair

Prepaid services launched pretty much everywhere around 1996-1997. They were a logical step forward and yeah, from the mobile operators perspective they're fantastic! No risk whatsoever, higher call charges, access to a vast supply of previously untapped customers...

The technology was there, it was a very logical step forward.

They just basically merged existing prepaid calling card technology with a mobile phone line.

It's just an add-on moduel for any mobile network. Certainly not unique to GSM either.

There's no reason why eircom couldn't do prepaid fixed line service if they really wanted to.

When meteor / eircom talk about higher revenues on contract customers it really has more to do with the fact that most of vodafone and o2s contract users are business users. Meteor have practically none of that market (yet!)

It'll be interesting to see if eircom now attempt to add a 3G licence to Meteor or if they'll continue with Meteor's original plan, to use EDGE for data services.

paulm17781

There is one 3G lisence being auctioned for at the moment isn't there?

I really hope Eircom don't get it, not so much because it is Eircom, I would just like more competition.