Avea

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

~ the eulogy ~

Avea exists because Turkey decided around 2000 that two mobile operators were not enough competition. Two more licenses went out. İş Bankası, with Telecom Italia Mobile alongside it, opened Aria in March 2001. Türk Telekom, still entirely state owned at that point, opened Aycell in December 2001. Both of them spent two years losing money into a market where Turkcell and Telsim had already signed up everybody worth signing up.

On 19 February 2004 the two losers were merged into one company, TT&TİM, and on 15 October the name over the door became Avea. Türk Telekom bought İş Bankası's 40.56 percent stake in 2006 and the remainder in 2015, so the operator finished its life wholly owned by a company that had itself been privatized in the middle of that story. It never stopped being third. At its best, in late 2015, it had around seventeen million subscribers against two rivals who each had more.

Here is the thing an outsider misses about the Turkish mobile market of those years. You could read a mobile number and know roughly what a call was going to cost before you dialed it. 053x meant Turkcell, 054x meant Telsim and later Vodafone, and the 050x and 055x blocks were Avea. Calls inside a network were cheaper than calls across one, so the first four digits were a price as much as an address, and people chose an operator by counting how many numbers in their phone started the same way as their friends'.

That arithmetic is the entire reason a third operator is a brutal business in a market of two. Every customer who joined Avea was making the calls in their own contact list more expensive on the day they switched. Price cuts do not fix that, because the thing being sold is not minutes. It is who else is already there.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Avea competed the only way the third operator can, which is on the bill. Cheap packages, prepaid aimed at students and young workers, a lot of advertising that never quite decided whether the brand was for the price-conscious or for the young. The slogans changed with the campaigns, from "Konuş Doya Doya" around 2008 to "Hayat değişir Avea'yla" at the end, and none of them stuck the way Turkcell's did.

It also arrived years after the incumbents had finished building out, which gave it the reputation it never shook. Avea was the operator you heard about when somebody lost signal on the road, and reputations about coverage are close to impossible to correct, because the customer who has a bar of signal never notices and the one who does not tells everybody.

~ the auction ~

The 3G tender at the end of November 2008 put the structural problem on paper. Three licenses were offered as A, B and C, differing in how much spectrum came with them. Turkcell took A, Vodafone took B, and Avea took C, the smallest of the three, for a total across all three operators of around 970 million euros. The networks opened to customers in July 2009.

Being third at an auction means being third in physics afterward. Spectrum is capacity, capacity is what a data network is, and the gap that opened there was not something a tariff could close. Everything Avea did in mobile internet after 2009 was done with less room to do it in.

~ what it became ~

On 26 January 2016 Türk Telekom put its own name on the mobile business, the fixed lines and TTNet in one move, and Avea stopped existing as a brand. The legal entity was renamed TT Mobil İletişim Hizmetleri. Nothing switched off. The SIM cards kept working, the numbers kept working, the shops changed their signs. What died was a word.

So the answer to whether Turkey's third license worked is complicated. The country still has three operators, which is what the regulator wanted in 2000. It is just that the third one is now the mobile arm of the descendant of the state monopoly, wearing the monopoly's name, rather than a competitor to it. The 0505 numbers are still out there in a great many phones, still dialing fine, no longer telling you anything about what the call will cost.

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