Telecoms firm Ocean is eliminating its minimum phone call charges for business and residential users from January 1st in an attempt to boost its business.
The company, which is owned by the ESB and British Telecom (BT), is the first in the Irish residential market to offer persecond billing exclusively and it claimed yesterday that rival firms would be forced to follow it.
"I would expect that some of the others will have to follow. People will have to move," said Ocean's head of marketing, Mr Andrew Conlan Trant.
An Eircom spokeswoman declined to comment on this, stating that it was not company policy to comment on its rivals' tactics. Eircom currently charges a minimum of 11.5p (14.6 cents) on residential calls and 9.5p on commercial calls, VAT included.
Asked whether Esat Clear would be withdrawing its 5.1p minimum charge on residential calls, a spokeswoman said the company would continue to offer competitive services. Esat Clear has some 30,000 residential customers. Esat claims an additional 30,000 customers under a prepaid programme known as Esat Home, while Esat Telecom has 8,000 commercial customers.
Ocean has about 10,000 telephone customers, although Mr Conlan Trant declined to reveal the breakdown between business and residential customers.
"Most of our revenue is from business at the moment," he said. "The focus of the company has been initially on the corporate and through into the small and medium-sized enterprise level."
The company is now focusing on the residential market. "Over the last year we've certainly hit a lot of inertia in that market. I hope that we'll be able to release customers from that inertia."
Ocean was investing a "significant" sum in an advertising and marketing campaign, he said. The firm is believed to have committed more than £500,000 for this.
Mr Conlan Trant said there was no suggestion that Ocean's owners were unhappy with the telephone market share gained since it introduced its service on December 1st last year.
Stating that the move to eliminate minimum call charges was part of its overall strategy, Mr Conlan Trant said 70-80 per cent of calls lasted less than three minutes, making per-second billing an attractive proposition for customers.
Ocean said a three-minute off-peak residential call would cost 4.5p in the new year, while a 20-second message would cost 1.4p. It said equivalent Eircom calls would cost 11.5p each.
Asked why Ocean had introduced national and international call services to residential customers a year ago, but not local services, Mr Conlan Trant said this was due to "exorbitant" interconnection rates. On suggestions that BT would make a "good fit" to take the 34 per cent stake in Eircom which is being sold by the Dutch firm KPN and the Norwegian operator Telia, Mr Conlan Trant said this was a "shareholder issue". "We know that BT is fully committed to Ocean and that applies to the ESB too."
