D2 Mannesmann

» see d2privat.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Germany got its first privately owned mobile network in 1992 and Turkey got GSM in 1994, so D2 and the first Turkish operators grew up two years apart on the same technology, in markets that never touched. I have never held a D2 SIM. The network earns a stone here for two reasons: it was the first telephone network in Germany the post office did not own, and the firm that built it made steel pipes.

The Bundesministerium für Post und Telekommunikation put a GSM licence out to tender in 1988 and several consortia formed to bid for it. On 8 December 1989 the group led by Mannesmann AG won. Before that month was out the winning consortium had become Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH of Düsseldorf, the first private network operator in the country, with Peter Mihatsch as chairman of its management. It had 350 staff by the end of 1990, and in February 1991 the licence was extended over the territory of the former East Germany.

The Bundespost had already run analog networks lettered up to C, so the new digital ones were marketed under D, with D1 for the post office and D2 for the challenger. Commercial service began with the delivery of the first handsets on 30 June 1992. Phones cost a little under 3,000 marks and were sold through television dealers and department stores. Coverage started at roughly 200 base stations over the bigger cities and reached 80 percent of Germany within six months.

The 100,000th customer was registered before 1992 was out. From December 1993 the company was in profit, which for a network operator four years from a standing start was fast. The consumer brand was D2 privat until 1999, when Mannesmann decided the word privat had stopped selling anything and renamed the product D2 Mannesmann.

~ the record ~

~ the day the letters came off ~

Vodafone bought Mannesmann in 2000, and the mobile arm was the reason it paid what it paid. Its global brand migration plan had been introduced that same year and ran through an interim period of dual branding. A Vodafone Group announcement of 29 October 2001 lists D2 Vodafone of Germany among the subsidiaries expected to migrate to the single brand within twelve months, after Portugal went on 22 October and Spain on 27 October.

On Thursday 17 January 2002, in Düsseldorf, chief executive Jürgen von Kuczkowski announced the switch. His line, carried by dpa, was that in trading D2 for Vodafone the company was exchanging a strong national brand for a global one. The same announcement confirmed that Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH had already been renamed Vodafone D2 GmbH. The new brand would be shown for the first time at CeBIT, which ran from 13 to 20 March 2002.

You can watch it happen on the website. www.d2privat.de was still serving its own page in January 2002 under the title D2 Vodafone. The capture from 27 March 2002 is a Vodafone page whose own metadata gives a creation date of 18 March. Its author field reads Vodafone D2 GmbH, and its description introduces Vodafone to Germans as a company they do not know well yet. By June it had stopped serving a page at all and issued only a redirect.

~ what the numbers were ~

At the end of 2001 just under 22 million customers were on the D2 network against a little over 23 million on T-Mobile. This was not a failing brand being quietly retired. It was the second largest network in the largest market in Europe, switched off as a name because a British parent had decided the word on the bill should be identical in every country.

~ where the name went ~

Vodafone D2 GmbH stayed the legal name for a long time afterward. It was still the entity that absorbed Arcor when the German fixed line business was merged in on 10 December 2009. Today the Düsseldorf register entry behind vodafone.de reads Vodafone GmbH at HRB 38062, and d2privat.de sends a browser to vodafone.de without comment.

Mannesmann itself came out of this better than its network did. mannesmann.com answers today with a page belonging to Salzgitter AG, under the line TRUST IN EVERY DIMENSION, selling the steel tubes the firm started with in 1890. The telecommunications arm that made Mannesmann the target of one of the largest takeovers ever recorded is the part of the group that no longer carries the family name.

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