The national love affair with the mobile phone shows no sign of abating.
This week Vodafone, the largest player in the market, announced that it would shortly sign up its two millionth customer, quite an achievement in a country with a population of four million. When you consider that the number two player O2 has more than 1.5 million customers and the third operator, Meteor, claims 320,000, the extent to which we have embraced the mobile phone becomes apparent and verges on the astonishing.
Despite holding such apparently commanding positions, Vodafone and O2 are adamant that they are not abusing their pre-eminence. The Commission for Telecommunications Regulation (ComReg) disagrees and believes that they are tacitly colluding to keep the price of mobile phone calls artificially high. It has produced a substantial amount of evidence to back up its analysis, not least the simple fact that we have among the highest bills per user of any market in the world.
Unsurprisingly the mobile phone companies contest ComReg's analysis and claim that the reason mobile phone bills here are so large compared to other European countries is that we talk so much. Anyone seeking to challenge this supercilious explanation quickly gets bogged down in a baffling array of statistics and acronyms.
But it is against this background that two other developments this week must be viewed. The first is the decision of Eircom to pay €420 million for Meteor, the third placed player in the market. The price is expensive by market norms and reflects a number of factors, not least the pressure Eircom is under to secure its future by adding a mobile string to its bow.
It is also a clear signal that Eircom believes that Meteor can take market share from the two main players, other- wise it will not grow the business sufficiently to justify the price it has paid. With that in mind, the company has already pledged to cut the cost of mobile calls by 20 per cent. It is worth noting that this is something that simply would not be possible in a market that is as competitive as Vodafone and O2 would have us believe.
By the same token, the decision by a fourth player to enter the market is also indicative that ComReg is not alone in believing that Vodafone and O2 are making excess profits. The Hong Kong owned 3, which launched this week, is confident that it can build a viable business offering calls at prices up to one-third cheaper than Vodafone.
The mobile market looks set for a long overdue dose of competition. This is good news for mobile phone lovers.