DUBLIN, Ireland-It appears that an agreement on site sharing between the three Irish third-generation (3G) license holders might have been reached only days after the first meeting of a working group established by the Irish industry regulator ODTR to develop a code of practice for sharing radio sites among the operators.
As part of their applications for the 3G licenses, Hutchinson Whampoa, MmO2 and Vodafone made commitments to support the regulator in developing such a code of practice. The first meeting took place this week, and sources within the operators suggest that an agreement has already been reached in principle to work together wherever possible. Such an agreement could save each operator up to 1.5 billion euros (US$1.46 billion) of the cost of rolling out a complete network from scratch.
If each operator works in isolation, it is estimated that about 3,000 sites would be required to fulfill all the license requirements regarding coverage, although it is clear from experience with GSM network development that it would be impossible to obtain that number of planning permissions in the current planning climate. Agreement among the three operators would see the eventual number of sites reduced to about 1,000.
