I helped some relatives move into a brand new apartment in Dublin on Friday. Who was the first person to greet us? The neighbours? No. The security guard perhaps? Wrong again. No, we were greeted at about 6.30 pm in the evening by the Smart Telecom sales guy. He had somehow found his way into the building past the security. He told us what a good deal Smart Telecom was, and that they would connect the line for free and give us their free broadband deal. He told us that eircom would charge us 120 euros to get connected (which I suspect may have been a little bit of a fib). But there’s no doubt that Smart are offering a good deal.

We looked through the mailbox. There was 6 months or so of miscellaneous bills and junk mail – the building has been occupied for some time -. We found that Smart had not been the only people who had called by. NTL (now owned by Liberty Global) is also making a big pitch for their broadband and telephone service.

It’s good to see that Smart are on the ground, being aggressive. They have done some pretty dumb things in the past, and canvassing new builds aggressively is the first intelligent thing I have seen them do in a while (even though it arguably involves committing trespass. I was most intrigued by the people who hadn’t been around. There was no sign of Magnet, and no sign of eircom ever having visited or even fliered the building.

There are around 75,000 new housing units being built in Ireland every year, mostly full of younger people, so these apartment blocks are an important marketplace.