Mercury Communications

Mercury Communications
Mercury logo

Mercury Communications was a national telephone company in the United Kingdom. The company was formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless to challenge the monopoly of British Telecom (BT) which was privatised in 1984. Mercury was the first competitor to BT, and although it proved only moderately successful at challenging their dominance, it was to set the path for new communication companies to attempt the same.


Contents

Residential phone services

Mercury began by offering fixed-line facilities direct to businesses, residential and small business. Users could use the 'Mercury 2300' service via their existing BT phone line by dialling a '131' prefix followed by a ten-digit customer code, then the number which they wished to dial. This was later replaced by a more modern indirect service which required only the dialling of the access code (by then '132') and the destination number. Mercury also provided backbone services to the emerging groups of British cable operators which were beginning to offer their own fixed-line telephone services.

In 1997 the Mercury brand ceased to be and it was amalgamated into Cable & Wireless Communications. The consumer arm of the latter would eventually find itself bought out by the telecommunications firm NTL in 1999, and then further sold on to NPower in 2001 before the service was withdrawn entirely some years later. Its name lives on through its original sponsorship of the Mercury Music Prize, now dubbed the 'Barclaycard Mercury Prize' in light of its most recent sponsors. The majority of the media, however, have not taken to using this new name.

Mercury moved into the Private Branch eXchange market in 1990 as a result of Telephone Rentals being bought by Cable & Wireless. This enabled the Smart Box to be connected to a large number of TR's customers, so traffic was routed away from BT onto Mercury's network.

Mercury pulled out of the PABX market in 1996, when it sold that part of the business to Siemens, creating Siemens Business Communication Systems (SBCS)

Payphones and mobiles

From 1986 Mercury operated public payphones in the UK, in competition with BT. These proved not to be profitable and this interest was sold in 1995. They were notable for their varied designs which imitated architectural styles.

Mercury also operated the first GSM 1800 mobile phone service, launched in 1993, as Mercury One2one. The service was first rolled out in the London M25 area, and offered free mobile to landline calls at off-peak times, weekends and Bank Holidays. Calls could be made free to landlines in the area the mobile was situated in, and to adjacent landline exchange codes.[1] Even after this plan ceased being sold, SIM cards that were subscribed to the plan continued to provide these free calls, and often changed hands for large sums of money.[2] Coverage was extended throughout the decade, with most of the UK having service by 1997. One2One was sold to Deutsche Telekom in 1999 for £8.4bn, and was rebranded as T-Mobile in 2002.[3]

References

  1. ^ "Mercury One-2-One challenges the U.K. cellular competition, Mobile Phone News, Sept 13, 1993 "
  2. ^ Together at last
  3. ^ One 2 One to rebrand as T-Mobile

External links

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