Free Constant Touch by Jon Agar

GSM. The Eurosceptic Margaret Thatcher was happy with this divergence.) Only eight PCN bids were received. It was by sheer chance that the bidding for the untried PCN and the potentially lucrative German GSM licences coincided, and many international firms understandably concentrated on the surer bet. Onelicence was already promised to Mercury (in fact a grouping of Cable & Wireless, Motorola and the Spanish telecoms monopoly Telefónica), so that it could continue in its efforts to compete with British Telecom. Mercury’s service was called ‘One 2 One’. The other two winners were consortia called Microtel and Unitel. The losing consortia included some of the big names of British electronics, such as GEC, Ferranti (in the form of a spin-off, Ferranti Creditphone) and an innovative private telecoms company based in Hull, Kingston Communications. In 1991, a bewildering sequence of changes in consortia ownership led to just two groupings: a merged Mercury and Unitel, owned by Cable & Wireless and US West and offering One 2 One; and Microtel, owned by Hutchison and the defence firm British Aerospace (BAe), soon to rename itself ‘Orange’.
    Mercury One 2 One launched in London in Sep­tember 1993. So when Orange followed in April 1994, four different cellular phone services were available to customers in the United Kingdom. While the two older analogue TACS services (Vodafone and Cellnet) and the two newer digital PCN systems (Orange and One 2 One) were technically distinct, the service was very similar and the consumer could make little technical distinction between the four. (Indeed, all were digital after the mid-1990s.) The result was intense competition based on billing packages and sharp advertising. A revolutionary shiftcame with the offering of ‘pay as you go’ packages, which were simple, required no credit check and were anonymous. One 2 One offered off-the-shelf packages with pre-charged batteries – ideal as a gift or for those daunted by complex tariffs. Vodafone promised ‘Pay as you talk’. Many of the deals were stoked by the marketing­ tactic – reprehensible in the view of many continental Europeans – of selling telephones at very low prices, subsidised by airtime revenues.
    But marketing was not driven only by price. While all the network operators invested heavily in advertising, it was Orange that made the early running, building a trusted brand with a catchy slogan – ‘the future’s bright, the future’s Orange’ – and breezy, amiable ads. Orange also boasted per-second billing and – most important for the fashion-conscious urbanite of the early 1990s – sleeker Nokia phones. The other operators took time – and money – to catch up. Star celebrities helped sell phones. So, in 1996, the supermodel Kate Moss was wishing for a ‘one to one’ with the young Sun Sessions-era Elvis Presley. (Orange had commissioned extensive public opinion research from the Mori polling organisation, and had discovered that Elvis was ‘one of the most popular famous people’.) Meanwhile, all four networks piled on new clients. By the summer of 1994, One 2 One had connected its 100,000th customer; the millionth signed up in January 1998, the 5 millionth in April 2000, and the 9 millionth by 2001.Cellnet passed 100,000 in 1988, 1 million in 1994 and 11 million by 2002 (by which time the old BT spin-off had puffed itself up with the groovier name ‘O 2 ’).
    Once the expensive business of rolling out the cellular network infrastructures – the base stations, switches, microwave links and so on – had been completed, the revenue from customers rolled in. The cellphone companies soon became industrial giants. In August 1999 One 2 One, less than a decade old, was bought by Deutsche Telekom, becoming part of the worldwide T-Mobile roster of networks, for £8.4 billion. (‘T-Mobile’ was a