Esat Telecom
The company was founded in 1990 by Denis O'Brien and was originally known as Esat Telecom. The name Esat, said to be an abbreviation of "Éireann Satellite" and connected to O'Briens bid for Ireland's communications satellite licence under the 1977 ITU frequency plans, would become much more associated with telcommunications in Ireland, however.
Esat Telecom applied a number of times for a telecommunications licence to the Department of Communications and was finally granted a limited one in March 1993. The company officially launched its services on 20 April 1994. It was the first domestic competitor to Bord Telecom Éireann (now Eircom) and, after initially reselling leased lines from that company, used "autodiallers" to route calls onto its network.
These devices proved controversial, with Telecom threatening legal action and the Department contending that these were a breach of Esat's limited licence. However, an Esat complaint to the European Commission was upheld, and eventually in 1997, the new Director of Telecommunications Regulation (now called ComReg) regularised Esat's position by ordering Telecom Éireann to provide a service to switch calls onto Esat's network.
In 1996, Esat Telecom, in conjunction with Telenor AB, bid successfully for the second GSM mobile telecommunications licence, against five other consortia. This became known as Esat Digifone.
On 7 November 1997, Esat Telecom Group plc held an initial public offering and was listed on the Irish Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ Stock Market.
Originally the company targeted just corporate customers, but from 1 December 1998, when the Irish telecommunications market was fully deregulated, domestic customers were also targeted, under the Esat Clear brand name. 1,300 customers signed up before it had even launched. In 1999, Esat entered the Internet Service Provider market, initially through the purchase of EUnet Ireland, which became Esat Net. However, it was the acquisition of Ireland On-Line from An Post that year which made Esat the biggest ISP in the country for a time. Also in 1999, Esat bid for Cablelink Limited, the cable and television company owned jointly by Telecom Éireann and RTÉ. However, NTL won.
In 1999, Esat Telecom was the first wholly owned Irish company to lay two optical submarine cables between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. No other company had achieved such a milestone and since then, only operators from outside the state have managed to install their own optical submarine cables.
Read more about this topic: BT Ireland, History