Toothless regulation is no regulation at all

Smart have finally bit the dust. Eircom, Ireland’s incumbent telco have sent Smart Telecom, a well funded, well marketed, innovative operator to the wall with debts of ???????40 million. I’d have no issue with this happening if they beat them on price, service, innovation or clever marketing, but Eircom are poor value, have rude staff, cannot supply ADSL 2+, and pitch their services as “the old reliables”.

You cannot blame Eircom. They’re no longer a state owned company with responsibility to the national good (another government fuckup). They’re a private company whose sole responsibility is to use every means at their disposal to make the greatest amount of money for their shareholders. The near-universal response from any Eircom customer who sees how much they’d save by Moving to Smart is disbelief, so Eircom must be doing a very good job milking their customer base for the benefit of their shareholders.

ComReg, the “regulator”, has no powers to regulate! They directed Eircom to speed up LLU and allowed Eircom to come up with a process that the new operators had to follow to get access to the lines. This process involved a the new operator emailing a spreadsheet based form for every customer they want to transfer. Eircom would then print out this form and have one of their clerical staff hand-key it into their order system. Because this process was so cumbersome, they could only handle a limited number of line transfers per week.

When the regulator would try and push Eircom into an action that would ease the transition of customers between operators they’d try to appeal the decision. When their appeal failed, they took the regulator to court and tied it up for years.

This didn’t sneak up on the regulator and the government who defined the regulator’s powers and responsibilities. It’s been obvious for a long time that the regulator would need the powers to impose sanctions and more importantly, an appeals process that would ensure that any disputes could be resolved quickly, fairly, and without possibility of escalation to the Irish court system. There is just way too much money to be made in the Irish telecoms business to expect everyone to play nice. Adherence to a stronger regulatory regime needs to be made a condition of every telecoms operators license in this country, and the regulator need to be able to impose sanctions up to and including suspension and revocation of their licenses.

I work from home a lot and was an early customer of ADSL. At the time Eircom were the only operator in town. Because there is no way of transitioning to another operator without an indefinite outage period (anything up to 2 weeks), I’m stuck paying ???????20/month extra for my 3Mb Eircom ADSL line. There are horror stories of people using other suppliers getting the runaround for weeks in the event of line faults. Eircom won’t let LLU operators repair the lines, and won’t repair them themselves until the lines are temporarily transferred back to Eircom (with the commensurate outage period). Because of Eircom’s actions, I cannot afford to take the risk, and neither can I recommend to others who need reliable service to go elsewhere.

This isn’t a victory for the better company; this is a victory for the company with the most lawyers and the biggest bank balance, and everyone looses.