Business Opinion: Today O2 is due to publish its figures for the three months to the end of last December. Vodafone are due out with their figures tomorrow, writes John McManus.

No doubt the Republic will once again be a star performer for both companies. No doubt we will get the by now familiar waffle about how the Republic delivers average revenues per user way above other markets because the Irish just love talking and not because we are paying over the odds for mobile services. As usual we will be asked to take this explanation on trust from Vodafone and O2, who decline to make public the data on prices and average minutes per user that would allow the hypothesis to be tested.

This time 12 months ago it looked as though an end to this quarterly charade was in sight. Comreg, the communications regulator had completed a study of the market and decided - surprise, surprise - that Vodafone and O2 were tacitly colluding to keep up prices here.

The regulator took the view that this was made possible because the two company's Irish operations are almost identical. Thus, argued Comreg, the two companies could establish from each other's published prices whether their rival was actually trying to win business from it, or maintaining the lucrative status quo.

The situation was most acute in the post pay sector of the market, according to Comreg, who said it was possible that excessive profits from this sector, which includes the lucrative business market, were being used to subsidise the pre-paid sector of the market.

Comreg's analysis, which was given the thumbs up by the Competition Authority and the European Commission, formed the basis of a decision to start regulating the mobile market. This would have given Comreg the right to regulate the price of mobile calls and also the rates at which mobile companies must give competitors access to their networks.

Unsurprisingly the two companies appealed the ruling to the newly constituted Electronic Communications Appeals Panel (ECAP) - which can review Comreg rulings - and made it quite clear that if things did not go their way there, the next stop was the European courts.

The ECAP hearing took place a few weeks before Christmas and was settled after two days with Comreg agreeing to pick up the €5 million bill.

The regulator has not disclosed why it settled, but some inference can be drawn from the two days of open hearings in which Vodafone concentrated its attack on the way the review was conducted - rather than the conclusions - and claimed it was not afforded opportunities to comment during the process. Nothing emerged, however, which appeared to undermine the allegation of price fixing by O2 and Vodafone.

Where the issue goes from here is unclear. Comreg has gone back to the drawing board and embarked on a fresh review of the market, which it says is due anyway because the previous one was almost two years old and a number of new players have entered the market in the interim, while the ownership of Meteor has changed.

As a result there appears to be no end in sight to the dominance of the market by Vodafone and O2 and with it the massive profits they generate here on the back of those huge revenues from the chatterbox Irish.

In fact, there is a very real prospect of a "groundhog day" scenario, whereby the fresh review now being undertaken by Comreg will again find that Vodafone and O2 are colluding, but the two companies will once again drag the process out through the ECAP - and possibly the European Courts - to the point where the data on which it is based has been rendered obsolete by changes in the market and technology.

The only option in that situation would be to start a fresh review and thus the whole merry-go-round starts up again and Vodafone and O2 carry on keeping the price of mobile services artificially high.

The only way for Comreg to break out of such a cycle would be to conclude that Vodafone and O2are are not engaging in price fixing.

The logical conclusion from this is that it is completely futile for Comreg to try and directly regulate the mobile market under the current set up, which it must be said is not of their design or to their liking.

Instead it would appear that all it can do is tinker around the edges with things like websites that allow people compare mobile phone rates in the hope that the entry into the market of a Hutchinson and other players will solve the problem for them.

That is not really much of a plan and there is no reason to believe that the new entrants will not settle for a small piece of a market that generates super normal profits rather that engage in full blooded competition.

The whole thing is a mess and it's not a situation that a Government that claims to be as committed to competition and consumer rights as the current coalition is can really ignore, but one suspects they will.