A court decision on the Republic's third mobile phone licence is likely next Friday, with Meteor hoping it will get the go-ahead to launch its service. British-owned Orange took the case against the telecommunications regulator, Ms Etain Doyle, after the office awarded the licence to the Irish/ US consortium in June 1998.
Meteor appears confident that it will not be stripped of its licence and recently it has bought the rights to several mast sites. But company insiders concede that even if the matter is resolved in its favour on Friday, there is little or no chance of initiating the service in time for the Christmas market.
An alternative date would be next April or May, and Meteor is almost sure to aim for this period. This would mean that the court case would have delayed the startup by exactly a year.
Already, mobile penetration in the Republic has reached 26 per cent of the population, with both Eircell and Esat Digifone continuing to sign hundreds of new customers daily. By next April, the penetration rate is certain to have reached 30 to 35 per cent.
The marketing task facing Meteor will at this point be significant. It will have a choice of targeting new users, or trying to poach existing Eircell or Digifone customers, or a mix of both.
When it initially won the licence, Meteor predicted it would sign up 70,000 subscribers within its first year of operation. At that time, the company said the investment would cost more than £200 million (#254 million) and would employ 600 people.
The licence requires the new provider to offer service to one third of the Republic's population from the start, progressively covering more. Meteor could meet its initial requirement by concentrating on the greater Dublin area.
The licence will be the first combined GSM and 1800-DCS system in Ireland. Subscribers will use dual band handsets, taking advantage of good GSM signal coverage in rural areas and the DCS system in cities. The DCS system uses a higher frequency than the GSM network used by Eircell and Digifone and operates in more restricted areas.
In theory, Meteor could concentrate on providing service in urban areas, and sign roaming agreements with Eircell and Digifone for rural coverage. But this would mean the two incumbent companies - which have spent huge sums building their networks across sparsely-populated areas - giving a competitor a "piggyback". Without the regulator's intervention, this seems unlikely.
Meteor is 60 per cent owned by the US-based Western Wireless, with the Irish-owned RF Communications controlling 30 per cent. The Walter Group, a US consultancy, owns the remaining 10 per cent.
