EsatBT on Newstalk

bk

EsatBT's CEO was on Newstalk 106 this morning. I only caught the end of the interview but it sounded good.

His main point was that DSL wholesale is too expensive, giving comparisons with the UK.

He said there is a need for more DSL wholesale competition.

He gave the lack of AOL and MSDN ISP in the Irish market as indicative of the lack of competition and the stranglehold Eircom has on the market.

MadsL

And I tried to get through to make the point that;

a) Esat got at least 10 million euro in the 2001 NDP xDSL Acceleration project to enable 35 exchanges with ADSL. Not to mention 2.65m for the SW Cork link. They rolled 40 out, barely advertised the ADSL product and then shut up shop once eircom dropped the wholesale price of broadband. They now do not offer the product that we all subsidised through out taxes. I once had an 'esat person' for broadband admit that the take-up was about 40 people on residential DSL. Well worth 10m euro then.

And now the slow rollout of broadband is eircom's fault. Interesting.

b) I have a sneaky feeling that Esat are part of the duopoly. Try getting them to take your money for line rental - they oddly 'can't do this' at the moment, but hope to 'soon'. I suspect that they really are not interested in doing this and will not fight for this business with eircom despite the legislation being in place since July. Muck? Shed any light?

Why does McWilliams never have any of these hard questions to hand, he needs to give more notice of who is on, so we can ring up and give some of the tough questions.

spongebob

a) Correct Madsl, here are the Details Some of the grant aided locations never got DSL such as Tuam and Roscommon and Longford . The grant was for 35 exchanges On Top Of Those already planned by ESAT which itself appears to have been the Dublin exchanges. They only did 40 in the end including Dublin. Ask bill.murphy@esat.com what he did with the money, IEP300 per exchange in towns where ESAT already had fibre along the railway line as you may have noted from that map.

That Cork project is detailed Here . It was almost testing in April 2002. Ask bill.murphy@esat.com for a fibre drop in Bandon, why not!

b) That is called Single Billing where you can have one customer contact point for Line Rental and for Repairs and Calls, along with a single bill. Ask Comreg what the hell the story is and while you are at it ask bill.murphy@esat.com when single billing will be on offer to ESAT customers.

On an aside , from that Grant aided Project List of 2001 The ESB Fibre Ring and Longford are go. Must ask Nevada about This

thegills

I have a feeling that Esat used some / most of the €10M installing duct / fibre between their exchanges and eircom exchanges in the 5 major cities. Not only would this allow them offer low cost residential DSL services from the targetted eircom exchanges but also offer valuable fibre-rich services to commercial customers serviced by the fibre.

From my knowledge it costs Esat €250k to DSL enable an exchange so it cost Esat approximately €0 to upgrade their 40 exchanges.

Ripwave

Originally posted by Muck
b) That is called Single Billing where you can have one customer contact point for Line Rental and for Repairs and Calls, along with a single bill. Ask Comreg what the hell the story is and while you are at it ask bill.murphy@esat.com when single billing will be on offer to ESAT customers.

Are you sure that this is ESATs problem? Is anyone doing single billing, or are we still getting the typical eircom stalling tactics on that? The UTV FAQ still says that you'll still get a sepearet bill from Eircom. Interestingly, in light of some other threads, it also says If you are receiving a grant from the Government that covers the cost of your telephone line rental this will not be affected and will continue as normal.

I seem to remember that eircom got a second price increase earlier this year and that the justification was that, because they had to give a 9.2% (or something) discount to single-billing providers, they had to increase the price they were charging by 8.5%. Apparently nobody at Comreg realised that 8.5% of 100% of eircoms customers who have to pay the increase comes to a lot more than 9.2% of the 15% of lines that eircom would have to provide a discount.

And here we are, 6 months later, and we still don't have a working single billing process.

Do you think Comreg will make eircom refund that price increase? (Yeah, right!).

MadsL

Mass mailing of Comreg then methinks....
Anyone concur....

Ripwave

Originally posted by MadsL
Mass mailing of Comreg then methinks....
Anyone concur....

I've spent the last hour trying to find anything on the ComReg site about Line Rental price increases.

According to this thread on boards, the justification used by eircom at the time for the 2nd increase in 2 months was that they had to offer a discount to Single Billing providers.

Here's RTÉ's OnBusiness report on the 2nd increase.

Does anyone have any more information on whether there are any Wholesale Line Rental agreements in place between eircom and any 3rd parties?

MadsL

Press release here
12th May 2003. eircom today announced that line rental will increase by 6.35% or EUR 1.11 (ex. VAT) per month from 2nd June 2003, to coincide with the introduction of Wholesale Line Rental (WLR). In tandem with this line rental increase, eircom is reducing the cost of calls from fixed lines to 087 mobiles by 9.64%, from 21 cent to 19 cent per minute (ex VAT).

Note they carefully avoided the 'as a result of..' phrase. The rental increase merely co-incided with WLR.

MadsL

Documentation on the WLR product is available http://www.eircom.ie/bveircom/pdf/wlrproddesc.pdf

The documentation is available...just not the product!

Ripwave

Originally posted by MadsL
Note they carefully avoided the 'as a result of..' phrase. The rental increase merely co-incided with WLR.

The "dictionary" post on the earlier thread I pointed to is wrong. In this case "coincide" does indicate a clear connection between both events - it's not just a "coincidence" when things coincide.

What I really want to find is what justification was used to get ComReg to approve the increase. That might require a FoI request, unless someone can find it on the website?