Sure from Cable and Wireless

[m419]

Cable and Wireless has rebranded Guernsey Telecom/Cable and Wireless Guernsey as Sure communications. The company has rolled out a mobile phone network in Jersey and isle of man under the same name, they are actual networks and not virtual netorks and they are launching homephone and home broadband via jersey telecom and manx telecom lines.

Could this be a start of a new network for mainland Britain?

A new network from Cable and Wireless would certainly provide more competition in the industry.

They would probably launch a virtual network in mainland, I've got a feeling its coming though.

Just think mobile services from Cable and Wireless, it would be like the one2one days of cheap phone calls!

Whats everyone elses thought on this and should Cable and Wireless build a new network in mainland? Would it benefit the UK? and would it provide more choice? As from November 2009, there will be only 4 networks in mainland excluding the virtual networks, this would certainly chuck a spanner in the works Orange/T-Mobile who think they are gonna be the largest network.

I can imagine O2 gaining its lead in being the largest again, when everyones contract is up I can see people switching to O2,Vodafone and 3 as those networks will feel threatened by the mega network between orange and T-Mobile and will launch a price war.

[Stuart]

I think C&W entering the market could be good for us. It might even shake up the other companies enough to sort out the various holes in their networks..

That is *if* C&W enter the UK market, and *if* they decide to stay (they've already entered the UK market twice, and left it once).

[m419]

They don't really class the offshore dependencies as the 'UK market'.

However, Cable and Wireless have actually rentered, They provide Tesco employees an indoor reception,they have there own sim cards,however, I think the outdoor coverage uses one of the 5 networks.

What went wrong with One2One?

Well,In 1993 they launched Mercury One2One which was 50% owned by Mercury Communications(A part of Cable and Wireless) and United Artists later to be called US West now called Qwest-a US cable company.

It offered very good value for money tariffs and caused serious competition with Vodafone and Cellnet. However, a year later Hutchison Whampoa launched Orange, Orange was a direct competitor to One2One.

By 1996, One2one's coverage hardly covered anywhere outside Greater London and Hertfordshire which was a big problem. Eventually they started spreading out.

In 1997, Cable and Wireless merged with a few cable companies and also merged Mercury,Cable and Wireless retained full ownership of Mercury and decided to rebrand all of its services under the Cable and Wireless brand, One2One was rebranded under its own brand with red and blue livery.

In 1998, they launched Up2You, the first Digital Pay As you Go mobile service, all calls made from Up2You mobiles costed 50p per minute,voicemail 10p per minute. It attracted many customers.

What went wrong?

Customers discovered that One2One had very poor network coverage as by 1998 it only covered 96% of the UK and was very patchy leaving very poor indoor coverage.

In 1999, BT acquired the 50% share of Cellnet owned by Securicor and BT became the wholly owned owner of Cellnet and decided to do a big rebrand and also launched its Pay As you Go service called 'U'. It was very cheap in comparison to One2one and offered a much higher Network coverage.

Orange and Vodafone also launched new tariffs and there network coverage was far more wider than One2one's.

Therefore One2one lost many customers because of this and began introducing new tariffs at rock bottom prices which generated very small revenue like Pay As You Go Standard which offered calls to other One2One mobiles and UK landlines from as little as 2p.

Cable and Wireless and US West decided to sell it and Deutsche Telekom acquired it, Deutsche Telekom put up prices within a year and a half because they planned to invest a lot of money on improving the network and then in 2001 decided to rebrand it as T-Mobile UK.

By 2003, it was much better but still patchy and features like GPRS where just rolling out on the network which was 3 or 4 years behind its competitors, Hutchison had already launched 3G services by then!

By 2008, it had caught up with competitors and offered 3G coverage covering around 70% of the UK population which was higher than O2. It still fails to be attracting customer and excluding 3 and virtual networks its still the smallest and which is the reason why it is merging with Orange, It is likely that the merged group will be called Orange.

So from this, Cable and Wireless can learn that under investment can lead to a lifetime of problems especially where competition is concerned.

Hutchison 3G could also learn from this, as I believe that 3 was rushed and more time should have been spent on developing its 3G only network, when 3 launched it had no 2G coverage at all and only by the end of 2003, did it start sharing another networks 2G coverage which should have been started right from the start to make sure people can at least make a phone knowing full well that the network was still under construction!