Following price reductions of up to 80 per cent, the European Commission has closed a 14-month inquiry into overcharging for calls between fixed and mobile telephone networks in eight member-states.
The Commission said the probe of 14 operators - including Telecom Eireann - was closed, but warned it intended to pursue an inquiry into competitive conditions within the overall telecoms sector. In particular, it would study roaming charges, the fees levied by operators for calls made and received by mobile users while travelling outside their home networks.
Brussels opened an inquiry into 45 companies in February 1998, but limited the scope last July to 14 cases where it felt there was a distortion of market conditions. It examined mobile telephony costs which were above a best practice level, defined as the rate in the three lowest-cost member-states, adjusted for changes to interconnect rates resulting from rulings by local regulatory authorities.
Interconnect rates are the fees operators charge each other when calls cross networks.
The inquiry looked into three areas. Regarding calls from fixed lines to mobile phones, it found that Telecom Eireann was one of eight fixed-line operators whose retention rates - the share they keep of charges for calls made from their own networks to national mobile networks - were "100 per cent or more above `best practice' ".
The others were in Belgium, the UK, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.
The Commission said that in July 1998 Telecom Eireann "was possibly off-setting the reductions in [Eircell's] termination rates by increasing its retention on fixed to mobile calls". But it found these retention rates had dropped by 66 per cent since then, and so closed the investigation.
Last September, Telecom Eireann reduced the per-minute rates of calls to national mobile phones from 28p to 23p peak, and from 18p to 15p off-peak.
A spokeswoman for Telecom Eireann said the company was not surprised by the Commission's announcement.
"Telecom Eireann has been aware for some time that the Commission was satisfied with our pricing policy in the area of fixed to mobile calls," she said.
The Commission said retention rates had dropped by 31 to 80 per cent among the operators investigated. The largest reductions were in Italy.
In two other areas, the Commission examined six cases of possible excessive charging by fixed operators for terminating calls from mobile operators, in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy, and charges for terminating calls levied by all five mobile operators in Germany and Italy.
It said these inquiries into the German and Italian mobile operators would continue under the auspices of national regulatory authorities, while it would close its remaining investigation into two operators, Deutsche Telekom and Telekom Austria, when they implemented the necessary price reductions.
