UPC said to be making deal with Three to launch own mobile service

Nolars

Will make for some good competition for quad-play in available areas.

"Telecoms operator UPC is planning an entrance into the mobile market through a partnership with Three Ireland, which is currently readying a merger with O2 Ireland pending the European Commission’s approval, reports say."


http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/34910-upc-said-to-be-making-deal/

ethernet

I hope this potential MVNO works better than Blueface does. Is anyone else piggy-backing on Three?

At least if the O2 acquisition goes ahead, the network might improve somewhat. Nice to have more competition as always.

fergus1001

Nolars wrote: »

Will make for some good competition for quad-play in available areas.

"Telecoms operator UPC is planning an entrance into the mobile market through a partnership with Three Ireland, which is currently readying a merger with O2 Ireland pending the European Commission’s approval, reports say."


http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/34910-upc-said-to-be-making-deal/

Well maby this is to close the lopole for students canceling there upc for the summer months (move billing address to ballygobackwards so they cant provide a service)

SpaceTime

That could be interesting if UPC really drive some price competition.

I guess they want to really push into the market with eircom now offering full quad-play service, even if their TV is a little basic.

Sky could easily launch an MVNO too if they wanted to.

watty

No, it won't do anything for long term price competiton. It's about locking users in and making more money selling people Bundles with services they don't really need.

I doubt it's a "Partnership". More like the existing Mobile resellers. The only real value of MVNO (Mobile Resellers) is if it proves a single well regulated (State or Private owned, but SERIOUSLY Regulated) Wholesale is used (RAN). A RAN could deliver more capacity at lower cost.

Having 4 separately owned and run physical infrastructures makes no sense.

SpaceTime

The only problem with that model as Telecom Éireann and ESB show is that the state body running the network tends to act in its own commercial interests and push costs through the ceiling.

You'd really want some very tough regulation and maybe some kind of mutualised ownership where the common network's owned by the operators on a proportional basis or something. If the state finds its a source of revenue, its tendency is to milk it for all its worth for dividends!

It depends on what UPC do with it though. If they drive it like a normal phone operator, they'd potentially drive down the prices like Tesco mobile has.

Also, from what I've read Tesco mobile's very safe as the European commission will force O2/Three to host MVNOs at reasonable terms.

MVNOs are a bit more than resellers though when they've their own switching systems, data and voice backhaul. That's how Tesco can provide international calls so cheaply as they're going through some alternative network. They're not just reselling O2 services. They're just using the O2 radio infrastructure to access end users much like a CPS/bitstream service on landlines.

The networks would definitely be better of pooling resources to get 100% coverage for 4G though and start pushing products and services nationally rather than having poor coverage in less densely populated places and having coverage wars between the infrastructure providers.

bealtine

SpaceTime wrote: »

The only problem with that model as Telecom Éireann and ESB show is that the state body running the network tends to act in its own commercial interests and push costs through the ceiling.

You'd really want some very tough regulation and maybe some kind of mutualised ownership where the common network's owned by the operators on a proportional basis or something. If the state finds its a source of revenue, its tendency is to milk it for all its worth for dividends!

It depends on what UPC do with it though. If they drive it like a normal phone operator, they'd potentially drive down the prices like Tesco mobile has.

Also, from what I've read Tesco mobile's very safe as the European commission will force O2/Three to host MVNOs at reasonable terms.

MVNOs are a bit more than resellers though when they've their own switching systems, data and voice backhaul. That's how Tesco can provide international calls so cheaply as they're going through some alternative network. They're not just reselling O2 services. They're just using the O2 radio infrastructure to access end users much like a CPS/bitstream service on landlines.

The networks would definitely be better of pooling resources to get 100% coverage for 4G though and start pushing products and services nationally rather than having poor coverage in less densely populated places and having coverage wars between the infrastructure providers.

Interesting...

I'm not sure anymore if private vs semi-state model argument is so clear cut.
Prices were better (but the service from TE was crap) in the semi-state model and government policy could drive telecoms policy, something which can't be done now.
Privatisation was supposed to give us more competition in telecomms yet we have the highest line rental in the known world and UPC have been slowly increasing their prices upwards to match eircom therefore becoming much more expensive than they should be...we were promised privatisation would bring DOWN prices:) Our experiment with privatisation has failed to deliver spectacularly.


The mutual network is/was proposed in Australia not sure what happened to it. In effect here there are only 2 operators here Mosaic and the other two, which may be somewhat muddied by the 3/O2 deal, they will probably duplicate infrastructure by driving fibre to lots of masts, if it were done right and we had a regulator, they could easily bring fibre based products to almost every town in Ireland and not just to the masts. That I suppose is agreeing with your points.