AirTouch

» see airtouch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

AirTouch was the cellular half of a telephone company, set loose to go its own way. Pacific Telesis owned all of it until 3 December 1993 and 86.1 percent of it after that, and on 1 April 1994 the spin-off completed and the thing stood by itself. It kept the San Francisco address and filed a fresh Delaware certificate of incorporation in September that year. The name itself was new, adopted on the way out of the parent company.

What it became was not really an American carrier. By 31 December 1998 the company and its ventures served 40 million wireless customers, on operating revenues of $5.5 billion and about 13,000 employees. Most of those customers sat on networks AirTouch did not control. The method was a minority stake in somebody else's national carrier, plus the engineering to build and operate the thing, and the company said so plainly in its own annual report: it had contractual governance rights over these ventures but it did not control them.

On 15 January 1999 it announced a definitive agreement to merge with Vodafone. Holders of AirTouch stock got five Vodafone ordinary shares and $9 in cash for each share they held, and the vehicle that swallowed the company was a shell called Apollo Merger Sub, Inc. The deal closed at the end of that June, and the British buyer renamed itself Vodafone AirTouch Plc.

None of this reached a Turkish phone bill. AirTouch held pieces of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, Romania, Japan, Egypt and India, and nothing at all in Turkey, where the names on the bills in 1998 were Turkcell and Telsim. I was a teenager on dial-up anyway, so the entire category sat one technology away from me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the venture map ~

The 1998 annual report prints the map as a table, and the table is the whole argument. Germany's D2 Privat had roughly six million customers against a 34.8 percent AirTouch stake. Italy's Omnitel had 6,190,000 on a stake of 15.5 percent. Portugal's Telecel had 1,370,000 customers and Sweden's Europolitan 624,000, and those two were the rare cases where the holding ran past half. Japan's J-Phone carried 3,475,000 on something between 13 and 15 percent.

The technical credit is less often remembered. AirTouch's German venture, Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH, was the first GSM system anywhere to offer commercial service, and the company's own filing claims substantial input from its engineers into the GSM standard itself. By the time of that filing the standard had been adopted in more than 110 countries.

~ 28 july 2000 ~

The annual general meeting was held on Thursday 27 July 2000 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. Resolution 22 was listed on the agenda as "Change of Company name." It passed with 25,740,008,361 votes for and 57,015,948 against, which is a margin of about 450 to one. The announcement that went out over the wire carried a note to editors at the bottom: the change of name from Vodafone AirTouch Plc to Vodafone Group Plc would be effective on Friday 28 July 2000.

By then the renaming had nothing much left to describe. The American networks had gone into the Verizon Wireless joint venture, which began operating in April 2000 with Vodafone holding 45 percent of it, and the European stakes had been absorbed into a group that had its own names for everything. The address airtouch.com now answers with verizon.com. Nobody switched off a service here; thirteen months after the deal closed, twenty-five billion votes simply agreed to stop saying the word.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »