"Eircom customers' telephone bills are the fourth most expensive of all 25 EU countries"

A recent OECD study published by the European Commission reveals: Irish residential and business customers of the incumbent pay the fourth most expensive monthly telephone bills of all EU countries.

We at ComReg successfully hid this embarassing fact by simply not publishing the relevant OECD/EC findings in our Quarterly Report or elsewhere. We chose to publish unimportant comparisons instead, which successfully kept the Irish public in the dark about our regulatory failure.

So it is all the more embarrassing now that Eircom chose to skew our misleading charts into an all too obvious bare-faced lie:
"eircom customers' telephone bills are cheaper than the EU average" is the big slogan in 1/3 page sized press advertisements. This absurd claim is then falsely underpinned by OECD charts published by ComReg: "But don't just take our word for it." The chart used in the ad has nothing to do with customers' monthly bills! (That's why we chose it in the first place!)
While we had done a perfect con job, Eircom had to go over the top and blow it:
(click on the eircom ad to see a bigger version of this bare-faced lie of an ad)


Unfortunately this misleading advertising is now being brought to the attention of the ODCA, the ASAI and the media. And they could start asking nasty questions of us why Ireland's residential and business phone bills are so high and why the public was kept in the dark about this fact.

Here's the correct comparative table from the OECD survey, which we at ComReg and Eircom should rightly have published, but did not dare to:


As you can see from the table, eircom’s customers’ residential phone bills are the fourth most expensive of all 25 EU countries. This is also true for business monthly phone bills.

See the full facts of the case in the letter sent to Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey.
Download the PDF file. (424 KB)

Resources:

Excerpt from the letter to Noel Dempsey , explaining the situation neither ComReg nor Eircom wanted us to know about:

Data from the official OECD graph comparing Europe’s incumbents’ residential customer’s telephony costs.


– Irish residential customers of the incumbent pay the EU’s fourth highest monthly     phone bill with €44.90 per month.
– This is 11 places dearer than the EU average.
– Only Portugal, Finland and Hungary have higher pricing.
– This is €7.70 more than the EU-25 average of €37.20.
– This is €11.60 more than the UK user is paying.
– This is €24.40 more than the monthly bill in the cheapest EU country (Cypress).


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