Summary

  • Eircom's €50 reward required an activated fibre connection on Open eir's network. ComReg treated that link as a wholesale promotion requiring prior approval, even though the reward went to the retail customer's household.
  • A December 2025 settlement established advance approval for such schemes. The earlier intervention stopped new registrations while expressly leaving room to honour claims from customers already registered.

A gift card is a discount with better manners. It arrives dressed as generosity, while usually having a fairly exact idea of what it wants the recipient to buy. Eircom's €50 fibre promotion in October 2025 knew something more specific: which network should receive the connection.

Households could choose a retail provider using Open eir's fibre network. To qualify for the reward, however, that was the network they had to join. Choice at the shopfront survived. The infrastructure rewarded by the purchase was already selected.

That distinction brought a consumer gift into an Irish wholesale regulatory dispute. Eircom initially regarded the promotion as outside the notification requirement for wholesale offers. ComReg followed the activation order underneath the retail sale and reached the opposite conclusion. The interesting question was who benefited from the condition attached to the present.

Follow the activation

The campaign began on 13 October 2025 and was intended to run until 23 November. ComReg's 17 October urgent decision describes the customer's journey: register with an Eircode and email address, order fibre from a retailer on the network, complete installation and activation, satisfy the qualifying period, then select the gift card. The target file contained 77,464 Eircodes. That was the planned audience for the leaflet, rather than a count of connections won.

For ComReg, the decisive transaction sat beneath that journey. Activating the line required a wholesale fibre order. Open eir, the wholesale arm, bore the €50 cost. The regulator therefore regarded the offer as an effective price reduction for the new active connection. Paying the retailer's customer instead of the retailer did not change that assessment.

A published tariff can consequently remain untouched while the economics of choosing it move. Money spent beside the bill can influence demand just as money deducted from it can. The appropriate unit of analysis is the connection and the conditions attached to winning it. Stopping at the retail recipient would leave the wholesale order conveniently out of the picture.

Eircom's recorded position deserves precision. In a call on 14 October, its regulatory officer told ComReg that the company did not regard the scheme as a wholesale promotion and therefore did not consider it subject to notification. It had launched without prior approval. The disagreement concerned the reach of an existing rule, with a live campaign already testing the boundary.

The mailing list was doing some of the pricing

Eircom had special obligations arising from its significant market power in wholesale local access. The contemporaneous rules required express prior approval and four cumulative conditions: an effective price above the applicable floor; no favouring its retail arm, with practical availability to a range of access buyers; no geographically targeted price differentiation; and no adverse effect on investment or competition.

This made the address list an economic term. Fifty euros offered broadly and fifty euros reserved for selected premises may have the same face value, but they compete for different orders. Networks need customers where their infrastructure is built. The geography of a reward can therefore matter as much as the number printed on it.

ComReg expressed preliminary doubts about the geographic selection. It also identified a risk that combining the reward with an already approved promotion could breach the price floor. For the household, simultaneous incentives become one purchasing proposition. Separate marketing budgets do not produce separate customers with conveniently isolated calculations.

There was a real competitive freedom at stake. ComReg had relaxed the previous general prohibition on these promotions in its 2024 decision. The incumbent was allowed room to compete through offers, subject to assessment of their conditions. Prior approval was meant to establish whether a particular campaign could run within those boundaries before it began generating expectations and orders.

An institution that allows conditional competition needs a usable route to permission. A company using that route needs to submit the whole economic offer. Neither obligation is discharged by calling the transaction a gift.

Stop the next promise, deal with the last one

The immediate measures required new registrations to cease, leaflets to stop circulating and promotion of the offer to end. They also contained a humane and commercially important distinction: Eircom was not required to refuse claims from customers who had already registered.

That provision separated the next promise from the promises already made. A household responding to an advertisement has little reason to investigate the classification of virtual unbundled access. It can reasonably spend its attention on the service, the price and whether somebody must be home for installation. Turning it into a volunteer wholesale-regulation specialist would be a rather expensive extra condition for a €50 reward.

Closing registration limits the campaign's further reach. Dealing with existing registrations handles consequences already created. Collapsing both into a single cancellation would make tidying the institutional dispute easier by handing more of its cost to the consumer. The distinction matters because commercial expectations do not disappear when a marketing page does.

The 5 December 2025 settlement settled the boundary for future schemes. Eircom acknowledged that this promotion and similar schemes connected with FTTP-based VUA products fell within the relevant definition. It undertook to obtain ComReg's express prior approval. In return, ComReg closed Case 3006 and agreed to take no civil or criminal enforcement action in respect of it. The agreement specified no new fine.

ComReg said its urgent measures had prevented an adverse effect on the wholesale market. The published documents lack redemption counts and net additional connections needed to measure the commercial outcome separately. What the settlement did establish was responsibility for the next launch. The gift could arrive at the household; the duty to obtain permission stayed with the network business behind it.