EIRCOM GREW revenues by 4 per cent to €2.06 billion in the year to the end of June last which saw earnings up by 8 per cent to €698 million.

Profits at the before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebidta) level came in at €647 million for the year to the end of June 2007.

Eircom chief executive Rex Comb said the telecoms firm had delivered a "good set of results" and he was happy with the performance of the company.

Growth was delivered by mobile phone arm Meteor, which saw a 78 per cent Ebidta increase to €116 million.

"Meteor has gone from being a nascent mobile provider to being a developing one," said Mr Comb.

Meteor has 983,000 subscribers of which 123,000 are the more valuable bill pay customers. The average revenue per user (Arpu) during the year was €40.20, an increase of 4 per cent.

This is in contrast with the two leading mobile operators in the market, O2 and Vodafone, who have been reporting falling Arpu figures for the last couple of years.

Ericsson is building out Meteor's high speed 3G network and Mr Comb said he was confident of meeting regulator ComReg's deadline of having 33 per cent population coverage by the end of September. He agreed it would be 2009 before a commercial service was launched.

Ebidta in the fixed line revenue was down 1.35 per cent to €582 million. This was despite a 4 per cent drop in the number of voice minutes consumed by Eircom customers. Voice minutes sold wholesale grew just 1 per cent while "data traffic minutes", predominantly dial-up internet connections, slumped by 45 per cent.

The number of DSL broadband customers grew by 30 per cent to 593,000 but Mr Comb conceded growth "has slowed down a little bit" in recent months. Mobile operators Vodafone, O2 and 3 have signed up more than 120,000 mobile broadband subscribers in the last year.

Mr Comb confirmed Meteor would offer a mobile broadband service when its 3G network was ready. "You start with what customers want and work back from that." He said earnings in the fixed line division had remained broadly flat by replacing falling voice minutes with "new wave" revenues and denied it was a function of price increases.

Earlier this month Eircom changed the way it billed for fixed-line calls. This would add 3.8 per cent to the average phone bill, which Eircom said was less than the inflation rate of 5 per cent. However, some telecom commentators said the changes could increase the cost of an average business call by up to 50 per cent.

During its 2008 financial year Eircom secured a €1.18 increase in the monthly line-rental charge from ComReg to €25.36. Irish line rental charges are the highest in Europe and more than 60 per cent more than the EU average.