ComReg are the telecoms regulator in Ireland. Their job is to make competition in telecoms healthy which should result in better offers and great pricings.
Recently they had another consultation and decided that eircom’s wholesale price for a wholesale broadband product (we’ll call it that for now) needed to come down in price. This was an extensive consultation and was really drawn out. So they decided on a new price. All the competition of eircom said “Yay”. But eircom didn’t like it and went to Court about it, which they are well entitled to do.
Even before they went to Court, ComReg’s own staffers were fairly open in thinking eircom would win in Court. But the Courts are on holiday now so we’ll all have to wait. Except we don’t.
ComReg have now decided their very extensive and detailed consultation and deeply considered consultation was in fact bollox. See, here’s the trick to ComReg, bring em to Court and you own them. They always give up. They always settle on the steps. Settling normally means negotiating but ComReg again and again just throw it all away. Here they decided to reverse another of their decisions and it cost 5 Million in legal fees as they had to pay their costs and the costs of o2, Vodafone and Meteor.
Which is what they did yesterday.
Citing the cost of contesting the appeal, the resources it would have to devote to it and the probability a judgment would not be delivered “until well into 2009”, ComReg said yesterday it had “decided to set aside its decision”.
The new price directed by the regulator was an interim one and would have been in place for a year. “A more detailed expert analysis has been furnished to ComReg since the announcement of the interim price which will enable a process whereby ComReg can propose a specific and substantive price to the market in place of the benchmark price previously proposed,” ComReg said in a statement.
More here. Magnet the only telco to give out about it.
I keep calling ComReg the telecoms poodle. Someone needs to put this mange riddled creature down after years of failures.
Photo owned by charkesw (cc)
Heads should roll for either them being totally incorrect on the initial consultation or being devoid of testicular fortitude to fight this out in Court.
Update: I see once again that the Consumers’ Association (who are on the payroll of ComReg by the way) have blamed eircom for this. More misguided bullshit from them:
Dermot Jewell, chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, has called on the European Commission to intervene if necessary.
“Comreg is being frustrated by one provider just because it’s in a position to do so,” he said. “There are other players out there ready to roll up their sleeves and get competitive and this is just another stumbling block for them.”
