O2 Ireland

» see o2.ie as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

O2 Ireland was the country's second mobile network, with about 1.6 million customers at its peak on the 086 prefix and roughly 40 percent of the market. On 2 March 2015 the signs came down and everything on it became Three. Three's chief executive Robert Finnegan said that week that the combined company was "now one brand with one customer base of over two million customers". Former O2 subscribers were promised 4G from that June as part of a €300 million network build, which tells you something about what they had been living with.

The company was several years older than the brand it died under. In 1995 the Irish government authorized a second mobile license to compete with the state-owned Eircell, and it went to Esat Digifone, a joint venture between Denis O'Brien's Esat Telecommunications and Norway's Telenor. Service started in 1997. Within two years the two shareholders were in open conflict over how to run it, Telenor stripped the word Esat out of the company name, and the partners started bidding for each other.

What settled it was British Telecommunications, which bid for Esat in January 2000 and took it private. BT kept the mobile arm out of its Irish integration and parked it in a division called BT Wireless, where it traded briefly as plain Digifone for under six months. In 2001 BT demerged the whole wireless division as mmO2 plc and rebranded almost all of it O2. Telefonica then bought O2 plc outright in February 2006, and the Irish operation became Telefonica Ireland while keeping the O2 name on the shopfront.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the license was won ~

The second-license competition is one of the defining Irish political scandals of the period, and it does not have the shape people expect. Nobody disputes that Esat Digifone built a real network or that it ran well. The Moriarty Tribunal, reporting in 2008, found that the award of the license had been influenced by payments made to Michael Lowry, the minister responsible at the time, by Denis O'Brien. By then the license had passed through BT and Telefonica and the original owners were long gone, which goes a long way toward explaining why the network simply carried on. A finding that a competition was rigged lands differently eleven years later, when there is no mechanism left to unwind it and nobody still holding the prize who took part.

~ four owners in eighteen years ~

The Irish mobile market was a good business and the sequence of owners reflects that. In January 2009 it was reported that Ireland was close to the most profitable market in the world for multinational operators, which is the sort of fact that explains why a network with 40 percent share changed hands four times. O2 shared its network with Vodafone from March 2009 and signed a separate sharing deal with Eircom in April 2011, so by the end the infrastructure was already half-communal.

Hutchison Whampoa announced the purchase on 24 June 2013. The headline figure was €780 million, though the price is often given as €850 million once deferred consideration is counted. The European Commission cleared it in 2014 and the acquisition completed on 15 July that year, with Three committing to carry mobile virtual operators on its network as a condition. That commitment is why Carphone Warehouse and UPC both announced Irish MVNO plans in the months afterward.

~ the sponsorships went first ~

The brand died in pieces and the sponsorships went before the network did. The Point Depot in Dublin, which had been renamed The O2, became the 3Arena on 4 September 2014. The Three logo replaced the O2 one on the shirts of the Irish rugby and soccer teams, and Three moved into O2's old head office on Sir John Rogerson's Quay. By the time the actual customer migration happened in March 2015, the name had already been taken off nearly everything a non-customer would see.

Nothing about this network reached me, and the Irish market is small enough that it barely registered outside Ireland even at the time. The brand did, though, through its mobile portal: O2 Active ran on Irish handsets alongside the British and German ones, and that product has its own grave here. There is also a detail worth keeping, which is that O2 Ireland launched a version of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode in October 2005. A Japanese carrier's walled garden, licensed to an Irish network four months before Telefonica bought it, two years before the iPhone made the whole idea pointless.

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