Indo: Esat may close

dahamsta

With thanks to Fungus:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=47430

adam

Stonemason

Is esat running at a loss here in Ireland is it due to incompetance is it due the Eircom ?.I know ireland has a tiny customer base compared to the UK but with a little imagination surely they could turn a profit.



Stone

jmcc

Originally posted by Stonemason
Is esat running at a loss here in Ireland is it due to incompetance is it due the Eircom ?.I know ireland has a tiny customer base compared to the UK but with a little imagination surely they could turn a profit.

Supplying home user internet connectivity has traditionally been a loss making operation. Esat originally concentrated on the high end business use but with the increasing availability of low cost connectivity, that market shrunk. (Also it had more competition.)

Eircom has being making a consistent play for the business side of things with companies being actively courted to move their hosting/e-mail operations to the Eircom servers. Esat on the other hand is not that aggressive in looking for new customers. Both companies are in the process of integrating ISPs that they acquired. Esat has moved from the IOL dialup connectivity from 194.125. to 193.203. so the integration/absorption of IOL is nearing completion. Theoretically this will lower the costs. Eircom is swallowing Indigo but I don't know if it has got as far as the IP consolidation phase. However it has more or less scalped Indigo's nameservers.

One of the big problems for ISPs has been the high cost of connectivity and the availability of low cost hosting solutions outside the country. The majority of websites/hosting operations (Com/Net/Org/Ie) are small and this market fragmentation has caused problems for Eircom/Esat in their continuing attempts to take a higher market share of the small businesses.

Regards...jmcc

spongebob

Esat was very aggressive in targeting the hosting/leased line needs of the larger business elements in the country. This gave them a very good top 100 industry profile by 1999 and helped sell the business to BT in the first place, 2 years ago.

They had the first significant web farm in Ireland, in Dundrum, and decided to move it to west Dublin (the esat x facility) this move was extremely disruptive to say the least.

Consequently they have come under a lot of pressure from other carriers for the high value business. As the hosting/leased line operations are interlinked they are being eaten away by eircom and colt to name some of the carriers who have not had high profile outages in the recent past. jmcc would probably know who from the number of big .ie domains that are no longer maintained on the ESAT nameserver space ...but were 2 years ago.

They have never made money on the consumer business and are going to get out of that as soon as they can

I don't think that BT have the stomach for the long haul in the Irish terrestial market, they have dodgyfone which is the bit they really want.

M

JTMan

they have dodgyfone which is the bit they really want.

Digifone/o2 is completely seperate to BT. It is now owned by mmo2. A demerger happened a year or so ago.

dahamsta

Digifone/o2 is completely seperate to BT. It is now owned by mmo2. A demerger happened a year or so ago.

I forgot about that. I wonder how much mm02 stock BT hold.

adam

spongebob

....is entirely owned by BT, it ha been spun out as a 'tracking' stock.

muchos_bongo

No it isn't. It's a public company. It went IPO in November 2001.

dahamsta

My question stands. Does anybody know how much mm02 stock BT bought?

adam