The former Meteor outlet stood at 27 North Main Street in Wexford Town. Eir rebranded the store in 2017 after deciding to drop the Meteor brand in favour of its own name.
Meteor launched in February 2001 and quickly gained popularity among teenagers, offering cheap prepaid SMS rates, free text messaging between 085 numbers, and free call promotions.
At the time of Meteor’s launch, the three mobile networks in Ireland were Vodafone, O2, and Meteor.
Eircom purchased Meteor in 2005. Five years later, the company launched a new brand called eMobile.
In 2015, Eircom rebranded itself by dropping “com” from its name. It subsequently renamed its mobile network Eir Mobile. Two years later, it announced that it was retiring the Meteor brand and that it would rebrand all of its orange-coloured stores under “Eir”.
Meteor chat
A notable early Meteor feature was its SMS-based chatroom service. It operated from approximately 2002 to early 2004.
Users could text Meteor’s chat number, specify a chatroom to join, and even set up their own private rooms. Groups of friends could create dedicated room numbers for group discussions, functioning as an early form of group messaging before social media or WhatsApp became widespread.
The service had significant limitations. Each new chat message arrived as an individual SMS, and during the era of the Nokia 3310 and 3210, handsets did not support threaded messaging. Inboxes displayed texts as a single chronological list, meaning that if a phone was left unattended, it would quickly fill with other users’ conversations.
Concerns emerged about the lack of moderation and the potential risk to children. In February 2004, Meteor suspended the chat service to implement age verification technology, stating that it would be offline for several months. It did not restore the service.