Arcor

» see arcor.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2006 i moved onto TTNet ADSL at home and there was nothing else to move onto instead. That is the whole reason Arcor is worth a headstone from where i am sitting. Turkey had one incumbent and one wire, and the resellers stacked on top of it were selling you the same line at a slightly different price. Germany got an actual second company with a network of its own, and it is worth looking at how much work that took and how little of it is left.

Arcor was put together in 1996. Mannesmann and Deutsche Bank set up a joint venture called Communications Network International, which in june of that year took 49 percent of DBKom, the telecoms subsidiary of the german railway. That last part is the interesting part. Deutsche Bahn had fiber running alongside its tracks for signaling, which meant germany already contained a national backbone that did not belong to Deutsche Telekom. It was lying next to the rails, waiting for somebody to notice.

German telecoms opened to competition in 1998 and Arcor went at it with the one asset nobody else could rent. It bought o.tel.o's fixed-line business in 1999, put its name on Hertha BSC shirts from 2001 for five seasons, and by the middle of the decade was selling DSL and voice over IP into households across the country. It never came close to Deutsche Telekom's size. It was still, by a distance, the second largest.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the tracks ~

The railway fiber is what separates Arcor from the resellers. Most competition in a liberalized telecoms market is regulatory rather than physical: you rent the incumbent's copper at a price a regulator sets, and then you compete on billing and call centers. Arcor did that too. But it also had its own long-distance network from the start, which is why it could undercut Deutsche Telekom on national calls in the late nineties and keep the margin instead of handing it back.

By 2008 the numbers were 2.1 million ADSL customers and 1.1 million still on ISDN. That is a real business, built in twelve years against an incumbent with a century of head start and a monopoly's worth of ducts. Almost nowhere else in europe managed to grow a competitor with its own infrastructure at that scale.

~ what got buried with it ~

Mannesmann was taken over by Vodafone in 2000 and Arcor came along in the box, which meant germany's second phone company spent its last decade owned by a british mobile operator that mostly wanted the mobile half. On 19 may 2008 Vodafone bought out the minority holders, 18.17 percent from Deutsche Bahn and 8.18 percent from Deutsche Bank, and took full control. The brand had about fourteen months left at that point.

On 1 august 2009 the Arcor products were folded into the Vodafone catalog and Arcor AG became Vodafone AG. Vodafone called the name change a milestone and promised customers that nothing else would change, which was true, and which is also the point of the story. Arcor AG and Co. KG was struck from the commercial register on 8 march 2011. The fiber beside the railway is still down there carrying traffic. arcor.de sends you to Vodafone.

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