A photograph of the Meteor store in Wexford.
This former Meteor outlet was situated at 27 North Main Street in Wexford. The name on the store was changed in 2017 after its parent company, Eir, decided to drop the Meteor brand in lieu of its own name.
Meteor was launched in February 2001. In the years that followed, it became extremely popular among teenagers, as it offered cheap prepaid SMS rates and free text messaging between 085 numbers. There were also offers on free calls.
Back then, you had three networks: Vodafone, O2, and Meteor.
Meteor was purchased by Eircom in 2005. Five years later, in 2010, Eircom launched a new brand called eMobile.
In 2015, Eircom rebranded itself by dropping the “com” from its name. Its mobile network was subsequently renamed Eir Mobile.
Two years later, it announced that it was killing off the Meteor brand and that all of its orange-coloured stores would be rebranded under “Eir”.
The Eir store on Wexford’s North Main Street.
Meteor chat
One Meteor feature that everyone seems to have forgotten about is its relatively short-lived SMS-based chatroom service.
So forgotten about, in fact, that there is zero mention of it online. That is until now, of course.
In 2002-2003, Meteor Chat was all the rage among my teenage peers. You could text Meteor’s chat number, specify what chatroom you wanted to join, and even set up your own private room.
For example, our friend group had a specific room number that we would all join.
This was long before social media or WhatsApp became the norm, so it was pretty novel being able to text all of your friends at once and have a group discussion.
Admittedly, it was a bit awkward to use. Every time someone sent a new chat message, it would arrive on your phone as an individual SMS.
Bear in mind that this was during the glory days of the Nokia 3310 and 3210, so there were no such things as “threaded” messages. Texts weren’t neatly organised into contacts or anything like that. Your inbox simply displayed them as one long list. If you joined a chatroom and left your phone unattended, your inbox would quickly fill up with other people’s conversations.
Unfortunately, there were concerns that the service posed a risk to children, as there was little to no moderation. If my memory serves me correctly, the service was closed down in 2003 or 2004.
