Another 3g licencee in the offing

Moriarty

ComReg have recieved an approach from somone (gee whiz, I wonder who? ) looking to get the 4th 3g licence that they couldn't get anyone intrested in back in 2002. They're now looking for any other intrested parties to submit expressions of intrest for the last licence by July 7th.

Anyone know if anyone other than the mysterious mystery buyer who set all of this off is intrested in a slab of spectrum over here? Is it a foregone conclusion they'll get it?


ComReg .pdf here

Sponge Bob

Moriarty wrote:

ComReg have recieved an approach from somone (gee whiz, I wonder who? ) looking to get the 4th 3g licence that they couldn't get anyone intrested in back in 2002.

Anyone know if anyone other than the mysterious mystery buyer who set all of this off is intrested in a slab of spectrum over here?

You may have noticed the following incentive in the document .

Spectrum Allocation
The third “B” licence will be assigned equal amounts of core 3G spectrum,
i.e. 2 x 15 MHz of paired spectrum plus 5 MHz of unpaired spectrum, the
same as previously offered in the original competition in 2001/2002.
In order to achieve a fair level of competition with the incumbent operators,
additional spectrum in the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands will also be made
available, on the basis of demonstrable need, to a successful Applicant who
is a new market entrant. This spectrum will comprise up to 2 x 7.2 MHz of
spectrum in the 900 MHz band, and up to 2 x 6.0 MHz in the 1800 MHz
band.

A new entrant will be able to stick a GSM underlay on their network and use spectrum fall forwarding rules rather than fallback rules .

Fall forwarding is where you negotiate 2G first and 3G if the signal is strong enough, the tendency till now was the reverse but most large operators now fall forward and the regulators let them owing to the immaturity of 3G ...its doubtfull it will work properly for years .

Then you cripple 3G phones back to 2G or use fall forwarding only if the signal is 3 or 4 bars out of 4 ...where they work well..... and presto, its a 4th 2g network by the back door and all legal and above board (ish)

Speculation centres on the applicant being an underbidder in the Meteor play doing a hedge.

Denis Phil or Oisin I'd say (- the Meteor winner)

bealtine

Sponge Bob wrote:

Denis Phil or Oisin I'd say (- the Meteor winner)

Todays Irish Times says clearly it's eircom...

selective leaking perhaps...who knows?

crawler

bealtine wrote:

Todays Irish Times says clearly it's eircom...

selective leaking perhaps...who knows?

The Irish Times <- NATURALLY it's eircom and selective leaking!!

Sponge Bob

I just emailed Comreg to tell them that SpongeCom is 'very interested' , do you think that will be enough ?

bealtine

Sponge Bob wrote:

I just emailed Comreg to tell them that SpongeCom is 'very interested' , do you think that will be enough ?

IoffL Telecoms Inc is very interested too

Solair

I'd welcome eircom into the mobile market. I would have a lot of potential benefits and would increase competition enormously. They're big enough, in terms of their marketing infrastructure to really make a very big impact on the market. Much more so than meteor could ever hope to.

They're not going to be entering the mobile market as the dominant ex-monopolist either. They'll be coming in as a fresh highly compeditive agressive new player which will do a lot to invigorate the market.

On the fixedline side of things, a sucessful mobile arm could see eircom stop being so desperate to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of their fixed line infrastructure. They might even start being a little more expiremental with new technologies if they'd decent revenues from another division.

To be fair, Eircell was always well run and very innovative. I can see no reason why eircom couldn't launch a similar operation now.

Having a potentially large native-irish player in the irish mobile sector isn't necessarily a bad thing either as it will tend to come up with uniquely irish sollutions rather than simply adopt Vodafone / O2 or 3's system of doing things.

Sponge Bob

Eircom dont do fresh but apart from that I agree with you Solair. They will probably brand themselves a certain purple colour too , tweak a few braincells

Lets see now !

www.eircommobile.com
www.eircom-mobile.com
www.eircomcell.com
www.eircell.com (drat )
www.eirmob.com


Adam, can I borrow your Credit Card a mo , promise I wont do the dog and pay you back next week ???

bk

Solair wrote:

They'll be coming in as a fresh highly compeditive agressive new player which will do a lot to invigorate the market.

Wow, never in my wildest dreams could I imagine anyone say something like this about Eircom, but I think you are right.

paulm17781

Solair wrote:

To be fair, Eircell was always well run and very innovative. I can see no reason why eircom couldn't launch a similar operation now.

The Eircom of today has nothing to do with Eircell. All the Eircell folks are now Vodafone. All the Eircom people of the Eircell days are long gone since Eircom was bought.

bealtine

Solair wrote:

I'd welcome eircom into the mobile market.

Actually so would I welcome them (eircom)

For all the discussion about margin
squeeze and what not, they (eircom) are only in the halfpenny place
when it comes to liberating the maximum amount of cash out of
their customers.
The two main mobile players are making such astronomical profits
here (highest ARPU in the world if I'm not mistaken) that anybody entering the market has to be nimble enough to outwit
the big two and grab those customers, should be like shooting ducks in a barrel, even if they went for the average ARPU they would still make a tidy profit.

Why not...the synergies (I win on the bs bingo!) are excellent.

Now if they want to preach from on high about liberalisation then let's liberalise. Roll on LLU...

Tom Young

paulm17781 wrote:

The Eircom of today has nothing to do with Eircell. All the Eircell folks are now Vodafone. All the Eircom people of the Eircell days are long gone since Eircom was bought.

That's right there all over in the middle/senior ranks of VODAFONE keeping the clique alive.

Funny how the entrenched civil service mindset sticks with folks.

Solair

Well if we know one thing about eircom it's that they're not afraid to play dirty! Vodafone and O2 better watch out... Eircom knows all the tricks that monopolies / duopolies might get up to

I'd say it'll be Eircom Mobile... they're quite obcessed with their brand identity. Bright orange swooshball logo etc etc.. and they'll be looking for marketing synergies with their existing fixed line business.

There are some unknown factors in the Meteor sale too though. I wouldn't be supprised if Orange or T-Mobile made a bid in an attempt to get into this market. It's very high profit and meteor are doing quite ok as they are.

E.g. if Orange bought meteor, they could then go on to bid for a 3G licence to add to the existing meteor infrastructure.

crawler

Sponge Bob wrote:

Eircom dont do fresh but apart from that I agree with you Solair. They will probably brand themselves a certain purple colour too , tweak a few braincells

Lets see now !

www.eircommobile.com
www.eircom-mobile.com
www.eircomcell.com
www.eircell.com (drat )
www.eirmob.com


Adam, can I borrow your Credit Card a mo , promise I wont do the dog and pay you back next week ???

Well my vote would go with Aircom

aphex™

Could it be www.t-mobile.ie??

EDIT: i did a search for all the domains eircom have registered a while ago, and in fairness they've registered every possible combination of the name. Wouldn't take that list as good evidence at all.

Solair

Definitely won't be Eircell anyway as that company, including its trademark, was sold to Vodafone PLC.

If eircom or Orange buy meteor it won't even need to do much of a rebrand. It already has a nice orange colour scheme that fits either

damien

According to the Irish Times Smart and Meteor have expressed interest now. Meanwhile Orange is apparently not interested in Meteor.

bk

damien.m wrote:

According to the Irish Times Smart and Meteor have expressed interest now. Meanwhile Orange is apparently not interested in Meteor.

Funny thing, I would much prefer Eircom to get it. If Meteor got it, then it would limit the market to 4 players (Meteor, 3, O2 and Vodafone), however if Eircom or Smart got it (or even some other player like T-Mboile or Orange) it would mean we would have 5 players, that would really shake up the market.

I also don't think Smart would have the financing, scale and experience that Eircom have to become a real palyer.

On the other hand I'd be happy to see Orange or T-Mobile get it instead of Eircom.

Solair

T-mobile have definitely expressed interest in the irish market though. They're down as one of a list of potential virtual operators.

It's quite likely that whoever buys meteor will probabally want the option of taking it 3G anyway. The question is wheather they could afford Meteor + the 3G licence.

JTMan

Solair wrote:

It's quite likely that whoever buys meteor will probabally want the option of taking it 3G anyway. The question is wheather they could afford Meteor + the 3G licence.

Exactly ... This is where I think the hint lies in the fact that Eircom will not go for both Meteor and the 3G licence. They cannnot afford both. Meteor Will cost 400 million plus maybe 50 million to finish the 2G network (if they choose to do this) and the 3G licence will cost 150 million plus maybe 200 million to build a network. Eircom cannnot afford all this with their high debt and low cash piles.

It is going to be an interesting few weeks to see who out of Western Wireless, Smart Telecom, Denis O'Brien and the VCs winds up with what in one of Europes most lucrative mobile market.

eircomtribunal

There's an article in today's Sunday Times about the third mobile situation etc.:

June 19, 2005

Focus: Three's a crowd
The impending arrival of mobile operator 3 will break up the Vodafone and O2 party, but will it be good for consumers, asks Douglas Dalby

Just a matter of weeks away from its lrish launch, Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 is taking the phrase “low key” to new depths. The mobile phone giant has done virtually no advertising, has only recently appointed someone to oversee its Irish roll-out, has no informational website worthy of the name, specialises in a little-used next-generation product and does not even have an office phone number.....

link to the long article is here

P.

paulm17781

I thought the "A" license was 100m and the B licenses were only about 50m?

eircomtribunal

paulm17781 wrote:

I thought the "A" license was 100m and the B licenses were only about 50m?

The 3G B1, as it is called, has an "administrative fee" of € 300 000,
a "spectrum access fee" of € 114 300 000
and an "annual spectrum fee" of € 2 220 000.

See comreg doc http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/ComReg0541c.pdf

P.