Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Not smart

Smart Telecom suspended trading on the AIM today to stop it's share price failing down to zero after infrastructure owner Eircom disconnected around 45,000 of its customers.

It's feared that an additional 17,000 Smart Telecom customers could be left without any broadband or phone services -- including emergency calls -- as Eircom begins the next stage of disconnecting Smart customers from its network because of debts owed to the incumbent. reported ENN

Subscribers still have their emergency calls, for the moment. And according to Pat Phelan of Free Roaming subscribers who pay line rental to Eircom can still make calls.

The basis of the dispute seem to be that Smart owes Eircom €4 million. A large amount, but I would have thought at it's spare change to Eircom, and probably less than a month of adverts for the weather on RTE. The sudden cutoff without any public warning is worrying. Does this mean that Eircom is in a lot more trouble that it lets on? (It would explain the slow roll out of broadband.

Or maybe they were trying to free up bandwidth for the highest bandwidth day that Inex has seen yet. On the other hand, how many billions have been lost to the Irish economy because business which rely on communications (both voice and data) had all access pulled out form under them.

I can almost smell a lawsuit...

take care,
Will

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