The Irish-US consortium who won the competition for third mobile phone licence has promised that it will reduce call charges by around 20 per cent and will make phones available to the masses. Meteor Mobile Communications, who were told yesterday that they had won the £10 million licence, also promised that they would roll out the service by next April. It will cover one-third of the Republic initially, concentrating on the major cities including Dublin, Cork and Galway. The award of the licence to Meteor, which includes Western Wireless International, a US based mobile phone operator and the Walter Group, a US consultancy firm, surprised the industry, which had generally expected the only other contender Orange to win the licence.

Mr Sean Finlay, the managing director of RF Communications, the Irish company in the consortium, said last night that the company was delighted to be awarded the licence. Orange, who currently operate the fourth licence in Britain and Northern Ireland expressed bitter disappointment.

In a short statement, Orange group managing director Mr Hans Snook said the company was extremely disappointed not to have won.

Orange was seen as the front runner from the beginning but as the announcement of the award drew near, Meteor was being touted as a strong contender. Its pledge to make mobile phones affordable to everyone and its Irish connections were seen as counting in its favour.

Mr Finlay said Meteor had invested considerable time and effort in preparing its bid. "We had a very competitive bid. In our view it was well-researched and we did a very careful technical analysis of the whole country," he said.

Mr Finlay acknowledged that Orange was a very strong competitor with a highly-regarded brand name.

"Obviously we had no knowledge of what bid our competitor was putting in, but we felt ours could stand up to scrutiny," he said.

Meteor said that the investment will cost in excess of £200 million. The consortium says it will employ 600 people eventually.

Announcing the winner, the Director of Telecommunications Regulation Ms Etain Doyle thanked both applicants for submitting bids of a high standard. She said it was the Irish consumers who will be the real winners.

"The licensing of a third mobile phone operator will increase competition and choice and the Irish consumers will benefit through lower tariffs and the availability of high quality services," she said.

The licence will be the first combined GSM and 1800-DCS system in Ireland. Subscribers will use dual band handsets, taking advantage of good GSM signal coverage in rural areas and the DCS system in cities. The DCS system uses a higher frequency than the GSM network used by Eircell and ESAT Digifone and operates in more restricted areas.

Ms Doyle said the dual band phones will facilitate a greater choice of operators while roaming abroad.

Esat Digifone, who won the second mobile phone licence, welcomed the result. Its chief executive Mr Barry Maloney congratulated Meteor.

"These are exciting times for the Irish telecoms market with full deregulation staring on December 1st with three competing mobile operators."

He predicted that one in every three people in Ireland will be mobile phone users by the turn of the century. Coincidentally, earlier this week Digifone announced that it had signed up 150,000 customers since it launched its service 15 months ago.

Meteor predicts that it will sign up 70,000 subscribers within its first year of operation.