Todays Times Business supplement- Terrible news

vampyre

Go buy borrow or steal the bus. supplement in todays times. P2 has cathal McGee pronouncing that eircom are simply refusing FRIACO. why? well because we have already flat rate ie I stream and light users are subsidisng heavy users(which innocent creature I am is how I thought it works) Then in an interview later in the paper he says the only competetion they face is Vodafone and O2. They are definitely trying to kill esat for the March deadline. I have an ulcer, it is now grumbling with acid and bad temper after reading this ****e.

Tazz T

Just read it. The man is a tosser. In the UK BT realised they couldn't hold on to the monopoly and took steps to minimise the damage the changeover would make. Eircom are blind to the effect that competition and losing the line rental monopoly in 2003 will have on their business. BT suffered badly; eircom will be lucky to survive.

Son of Blam

Could somebody post the article here? (C'mon, get typing!)

vampyre

I don't know, the fact that esat have this march deadline combined with the apathy of the majority and lets not forget AJF has so much power here. The fight needs to turn nasty now. Regulator do something to compel via loophole. How can Eircom just refuse a reasonable request but guess what they can and they have.

SkepticOne

This is just Eircom expressing their lack of interest in flat-rate in the paper. They've never been interested in it. No surprises there. I don't think many people are interested in Eircom's vision of the Internet anyway.

Lemming

Originally posted by SkepticOne
I don't think many people are interested in Eircom's vision of the Internet anyway.

Three cheers for Eir-Coma and their revolutionary and pioneering vision of telecomms :rolleyes:

muppets

crawler

The sad thing about this is they are right.....look at the serious Telco's here....Esat , COLT, Nevada , NTL , Chorus , C&W , Worldcom and the likes.....most of them only really compete on the business side as opposed to residential , some of them only have a limited network and most of them have bugger all money!

DSL is WAY to expensive even at the wholesale rate , so there can not be any serious competition in the market unless someone looks at sub-local loop stuff on DSLAMS and the likes....

Wireless operators may be our only help but they seem to disappear as quick as they start up...

FRIACO ( although it's a slow service ) at least will get people interested in the Internet and it will follow on that people will then want higher speeds i.e. DSL/CM - why cant Eircom see this??

"He sits and screams as he looks into the abyss........"

aidan_dunne

Eircom are really starting to look foolish now. Okay, we know they don't want FRIACO and want to continue using the per-minute pricing model in order to continue ripping off customers and maintain their huge profit margins, but saying things like, "Hey, why do you want FRIACO? You've got the flat-rate I-Stream to choose from", and saying that they think Vodafone and O2 are who they see as their main rivals in the market just makes it sound as if Eircom have completely lost all touch with reality.

In mean, ffs, Vodafone and O2 are mobile phone companies and Eircom figure that they are their biggest rivals in the landline market? What the f**K are Eircom on? And don't get me started on their FRIACO/I-Stream statement!

Obviously Eircom have now completely and totally lost the plot and they are starting to look like a bunch of senile old men who really haven't a clue what's going on around them and, quite frankly, don't care as long as everything seems to be okay in their own little world.

As Tazz T said, BT knew they had to get with the programme in the UK or basically go down the pan and, as a result, they haven't done badly at all in the UK market now, have they? Eircom just don't seem to be able to see this and are stuck in this permanent frame of mine that "Everything's okay as it is. We don't need to do anything new or introduce new products to the market. Things are just hunky-dory and will always be for us." However, they are making the mistake that BT avoided and Eircom are going to find out pretty soon that things are not "hunky-dory" and, personally, I can't wait to see their "happy little world" collapsing all around them.

Eircom, a word of advice. Do what BT did in the UK and get with the programme or wave bye-bye forever!

jd

Originally posted by aidan_dunne
In mean, ffs, Vodafone and O2 are mobile phone companies and Eircom figure that they are their biggest rivals in the landline market? What the f**K are Eircom on?

I think it was "voice market" that was mentioned, which would be quite true..

timod

....and the way things are going, it'll be cheaper to connect to the net via the mobile operators soon. Jeez, even if I got the paltry 9k per sec flat rate over my phone I'd take it.

Anybody know/heard of any plans for the mobile operators to use their masts for 802.11 or indeed to make WAP (or whatever they're calling it now) flat rate?

aidan_dunne

Okay, I stand corrected on that, jd.

vampyre

Am using GPRS which is stupidly expensive but it is a good mobile net service. To state the flipping obvious you can't always bring your pc +connection and this is actually faster than my pathetic degraded landline connection.

aidan_dunne

Originally posted by vampyre
......this is actually faster than my pathetic degraded landline connection.

Says a lot about Eircom's crappy network then, doesn't it? Perhaps if they re-invested some of their huge profits into upgrading their network rather than shoving the cash into their own pockets we wouldn't be in quite the mess we are in today.

Greedy ba$tards!!!! :mad:

Stonemason

Says a lot about Eircom's crappy network then, doesn't it? Perhaps if they re-invested some of their huge profits into upgrading their network rather than shoving the cash into their own pockets we wouldn't be in quite the mess we are in today.

Could be that Eircon know full well they are going to go out of business and are just milking the very last profit out of their land lines as much as pos before the end comes.You only have to look around to see most people in Ireland now carry a mobile which must have hit Eircons profits quite badly.Whether mobiles for net access is the future who knows for the moment we are land locked.


No more Eircom monopoly what a sad day that would be:D


Stone

aidan_dunne

Originally posted by Stonemason
Could be that Eircon know full well they are going to go out of business and are just milking the very last profit out of their land lines as much as pos before the end comes.You only have to look around to see most people in Ireland now carry a mobile which must have hit Eircons profits quite badly.Whether mobiles for net access is the future who knows for the moment we are land locked.

That's an interesting point, Stonemason. I have a mobile and I tend to use that for all my calls and I hardly ever use the landline to make any calls. I only really use it for the net. In fact, most of the people I know are the same. Perhaps it's laziness on their/our part to get up off the chair/couch/out of the bed or whatever to go and use the landline, I'm not sure, but I for one don't use it much at all.

I suppose there has been this overall trend towards using mobiles more and Eircom are a bit worried when you hear ads on the radio featuring cowboys and God and St. Peter trying to encourage people to put down their mobiles and us the house phone! I'm sure Eircom have taking some sort of a hit during the mobile phone boom of the last couple of years. However, I'm sure there will always be that market for landline voice calls, especially with businesses.

And as for Eircom milking the network before they go out of business, I think that's a very valid point. I mean, let's face it, we all know Sir Tony bought Eircom purely for the purpose of making as much moola for him as possible before he probably flogs it off to the poor next unsuspecting gob$hite. I just wonder when that time comes will there actually be anything left of Eircom to flog or will anyone be foolish enough to buy it because, by then, I'm sure Eircom will be seen for the shoddy, desperate company it is and nobody would want to be associated with it.

dahamsta

Eircom isn't going out of business anytime soon. Remember, even if Voice-over-IP becomes the norm - and we're a long, LONG way away from that - the PSTN is still the primary last-mile connectivity solution. Even if flat-rate gets rolled out tomorrow, there's still plenty of money to be made out of the PSTN for everyone, including the incumbent; from both wholesale and retail channels.

Eircom's primary problems are staffing and their resistance to innovation, and Nolan can only forestall dealing with these so long. Ultimately, he's going to have to deal with them soon - this year - because if he doesn't, Eircom /will/ die, and he'll never be offered a chief executive position again. I very much doubt Nolan will let that happen.

You're also forgetting about business - sure, there's more wireless connections out there than fixed-line now, but voice remains the primary communication method for business. That's not going to change overnight. If anything, it will make a slow progression towards VoIP, and people will still use the phone, just routed over the Internet.

There will always be people like me out there, people that dislike using the phone, that prefer to use email; if not for convenience, then for audit and reference. And the numbers of people like me will grow and grow. But it will be a long time before we become the majority. Until then, and even beyond then, there's still plenty of room for incumbents.

Let me put it this way: If everything went haywire tomorrow, and Nolan screwed up, and Eircom went bust, nothing would change for us. We'd just have a new incumbent to battle against. Such is life.

adam