HOWZAT

“We have to get past the perception that the internet is only useful for e-mail and booking Ryanair flights,” said Orla Duffy, head of marketing communications at Irish Broadband. “You have to wonder why people are queuing up to pay for their motor tax or do their banking when these kind of things can be done online.”

Irish Broadband is launching a €1m marketing campaign in the run-up to Christmas with the aim of differentiating its wireless product from fixed-line competitors, particularly Eircom. The emphasis will be on ease of hook-up, the competitive €18.95 a month price tag and “plug-and-play portability”, so customers who do not have a fixed telephone line will be able to use the internet at their computer anyway.

“Mobile penetration is at record levels, phone lines — and their inherent costs — are a thing of the past,” said Killian Flanagan, the client services director at Leo Burnett, which was behind the campaign. “It was our brief to get this message across.

“The world has moved on, yet some providers have not, hence the slogan — ‘Some things don’t work without lines, but our broadband does’.”

The latest Comreg figures show that Eircom still enjoys a 78% share of the predominant fixed-line DSL market and a 65% share of the broadband market across all platforms, including wireless and satellite.

Aside from legal disputes with competitors and its duel with Comreg, the regulator, over access, the market leader has also been splashing out heavily on marketing.

David McRedmond, Eircom’s commercial director, says the company has spent €42m marketing broadband over the past two years alone. Eircom is targeting 500,000 users by the end of 2007, but at the current rate of take-up this would take another five years.

McRedmond admits that even with No Frontiers presenter Kathryn Thomas fronting its television campaign, Eircom has a job on its hands to accelerate the process. “There are 40 other providers out there, it’s a very, very tough market and it’s not an easy sell,” said McRedmond.

And if it’s not an easy sell for an incumbent with market dominance, how much more difficult is it for companies that don’t have the cash reserves to burn?

Access to the Eircom network remains key for many would-be competitors, such as Smart Telecom, which is currently embroiled in a €47m legal action over the matter.

But Smart has not been content to await the outcome of the case, pumping €4m into marketing this year alone, a huge investment for a company that is capitalised at just €53m.

“From a marketing point of view, we are definitely on target,” said Rhona Bradshaw, Smart’s head of marketing. “Our aim was to promote awareness and we’ve definitely done that. It’s gone better than expected.”

Smart has offered free line rental for life to the first 100,000 customers who sign up to broadband, and while it has received about 25,000 signatures so far, it has only managed to hook up 2,900 of those.

Smart has blamed Eircom for its inability to deliver the service. At the same time, Smart’s competitors have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland that its campaign offering free line rental is misleading, given that it cannot supply the service to all who apply at the moment.

While Smart is inviting all-comers to try its products, at least one other established provider targets consumers that it knows have broadband lines.

NTL has spent heavily on improving its platform, but yet a mere 25% of its cable network is broadband enabled.

“We know exactly which households have broadband capability so that’s where we concentrate our efforts,” said Mark Mohan, NTL’s director of sales and marketing. “We are focused on field sales and on direct marketing — our model stacks up.

“As a market leader with saturation coverage, it is reasonable that Eircom does television advertising and the like but we do not believe NTL would benefit from following a similar course.”

Mohan says the latest figures for broadband take-up reflect a classic market situation for new products of this type: “There is no doubt the growth is starting to come through now, albeit from a low base.”