Eircom has reported a drop in revenue for the 3 months to the end of December and a fall in earnings for the same period.

Revenue was down 6% to €361 million, while earnings dropped 8% to €119 million.

The company said its operating costs came to €157 million which it says is an improvement of 7% on the same time in 2011.

Efforts are continuing to make savings at the company.

CEO of Eircom Group Herb Hribar said "The business continues to perform in line with expectations as we make progress to stem our customer losses, revenue decline and profitability erosion".

Mr. Hribar also announced plans to expand the firm's fibre network from 1 million to 1.2 million homes and businesses.

He says this will provide high speed broadband connections to 60% of Irish homes and businesses.

Growth in mobile market

In the mobile market, Eicom says customers grew by 1% in the quarter to 1,086,000 through the end of December.

This was largely driven by post-pay growth that resulted in 40,000 net mobile additions for the half year.

However mobile revenues continued to slide by 5% for the quarter.

Richard Moat is chief financial officer of Eircom.

He told Newstalk's Business Editor Ian Guider they expect around 600 people to leave the company under a redundancy scheme introduced in January which will lead to further savings.