The appeal by the telecoms group, Orange, against the decision to grant the third mobile phone licence to a rival company would be defended vigorously, the director of telecommunications regulation, Ms Etain Doyle, said yesterday.

Ms Doyle said she was "quite confident" of the process by which the licence was awarded to the Meteor consortium last June.

Orange, a British mobile phone operator, began High Court proceedings against the office of the director of telecommunications regulation the following month. The case will be heard on March 9th.

Addressing the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, Ms Doyle said she was anxious to get the third player into the market and had hoped it would have been possible last year. But Orange was entirely within its legal rights to challenge the decision, she said.

Orange's shareholders are Hutchinson Whampoa which has a 49 per cent stake, British Aerospace which has a 5 per cent stake, with the remaining stake being held publicly.

Meteor is a consortium whose majority shareholder is the US-based Western Wireless International, which has a 60 per cent stake. Irish-owned RF Communications has a 30 per cent stake, and the remaining 10 per cent is held by the US Walter Group consultancy.

Ms Doyle said the effects of three months of market liberalisation were already in evidence. "Dramatic decreases in retail call charges, with some call costs decreasing by over 50 per cent since 1996, is further evidence of the effect of competition."

As part of the office's market development work, a marketing intelligence unit would be established which would provide the public with comparative information on the charging of tariffs.

Ms Doyle said she believed the State could be a centre for e-commerce with its "secret weapon" of the skills of returned emigrants and a "combination of people from different backgrounds" to make the transition.

Among the issues facing the office over the coming months is the issuing of licences for the use of wireless in the local loop, for areas where wired networks are not economically feasible.

A second important area, she said, was the consultation on the unbundled local loop, giving competitors end-to-end control of customer business. A timetable will be set for the introduction of new accounting practices for Telecom Eireann based on long-run incremental costs, a move expected to provide reductions in charges to service providers. Accounting separation is also due and is aimed at introducing price transparency by preventing cross-subsidisation of activities by the major operator "which has the muscle to price low in contested markets while pricing high in markets much less open to competition".

"The purpose of accounting separation as set out in EU recommendations which we are following is to provide an analysis of information derived from the accounting records to reflect as closely as possible the performance of parts of the business as if they had operated as separate businesses," Ms Doyle said.