Eircom planning to combine TV with phone and broadband bundles

Eircom is planning to combine fixed line, TV, broadband and mobile phone bills into one single bundle to provide customers with a single bill for all their entertainment and communications.

Speaking at the Cork Chamber Business Breakfast briefing, the Eircom CEO Herb Hribar said that the bundle would allow the company to provide good value for customers.

Eircom is hoping that by launching a TV service and leveraging its existing services — fixed line phone, broadband and mobile — it can beat off the competition.

“Eircom will be in a unique position where we will be able to offer a TV-led bundle, either a triple play with TV fixed and broadband but we will also be able to offer a fixed mobile bundle. With these triple and quad-play bundles we think we are giving customers the opportunity to buy products and services the way that they want to, so all of the products are on one bill,” he said.

Mr Hribar said the deal would offer good value for money.

“We will be able to say for the first time in the longest time that Eircom is the value leader in the market places with these bundles,” he said.

Mr Hribar said that following Eircom’s exiting from examinership the company was investing heavily in Ireland. He said Eircom has a €1.5bn infrastructure development plan in place that will see it becoming the market leader in both mobile and fibre broadband.

“As we came out of the examinership process our plan was built on change. The cornerstone of that is the idea that we would invest €1.5bn in infrastructure here over the course of our strategic plan,” he said.

Eircom has had a chequered past in the market with previous owners loading the company with debt before selling it on. Mr Hribar said that they were funding the current expansion directly from cashflow and that they were in Ireland for the long haul.

The company has also entered a new business sector by developing a partnership with Amazon that will allow it to provide managed cloud solutions to customers.

“We are investing in cloud computing. You will have heard of cloud, but cloud is an idea that has been around for a long time. It allows companies to rid themselves of the difficulties, the expense, the cost and vagaries of running an IT organisation so what you can do is move your IT on to the cloud. Eircom is partnering with Amazon web services to manage that infrastructure. We can help you move your IT challenge from your back end, your office or your data centre into a very secure hosted infrastructure,” he said.