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Speaking at a Wireless Wednesday conference at the Comms 2001 event at the RDS, Dublin, were Tadhg O'Toole of Budget Telecoms, David Parkinson of Broadband Solutions, Brian O'Donoghue formerly of Imagine, Ulrich Reinecker of Questus and Niall Mackey of Nokia Ireland.
At the forum, entitled "MVNOs and acquisitions: opportunities for meeting new markets," the speakers discussed the current situation in Ireland, where according to Brian O'Donoghue, having all the necessary equipment to launch an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) does not mean a company will get access.
"You have to be on friendly terms with the incumbent operator," he said. "There is no guarantee that the regulator will intervene if talks between the operator and the MVNO breakdown."
O'Donoghue went onto say that under the current operating conditions in Ireland, he would not recommend investment in an MVNO.
"Imagine tried for two years to negotiate an MVNO in Ireland. We got one in Denmark in the space of six weeks. That says a lot about how we embrace competition over here," he said.
MVNOs are mobile telecommunication service providers that simply rent capacity from mobile network operators as an independent player. Rented capacity, which is resold to customers, is sometimes purchased with volume discounts which allows MVNOs to sell the service at competitive rates.
Tadhg O'Toole suggested that the two large operators in Ireland want to keep the networks to themselves. The speakers discussed the MVNO situation in other countries, such as the UK, where Virgin has successfully established an MVNO, and China, where if an incumbent operator has more than 30 percent of the mobile traffic in Hong Kong, must, under law, be that of an MVNO.
The speakers agreed that in order for MVNOs to become a successful entity in Ireland, they must be willing to compete with the incumbent operators in as many ways as possible.
"An MVNO must differentiate, either socially or demographically. In the UK for example, Virgin are already on the way to offering a global coverage," Ulrich Reinecker said.
David Parkinson suggested that MVNOs compete by lowering the price of SMS messaging, or by offering free Internet access as a means of checking both SMS and voice messages.
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