Dingo Blue

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

~ the eulogy ~

Optus set up Dingo Blue in July 1999 to sell cheap telephone service to Australians who were leaving Telstra, and styled the name in lowercase on everything it printed. The pitch was one pricing plan with no contract and no flagfall, which is the Australian word for the fee a carrier charges you the moment a call connects, before a single second of it has been counted. Calls came first, with dial-up internet and a GSM mobile service added beside them.

The website was doing something that looked minor then and turned out to be the whole future of telco: you could log in and read your previous bills, check what you had spent so far this month and change your own contact details without phoning anybody. A telephone company in 1999 that let you manage your account yourself was ahead of nearly all of them.

In December 2000, Optus sold the brand to the Australian Gas Light Company for $22 million, with more than 74,000 customers attached. Eighteen months later it was shut. The customer base had slipped to about 68,000 by March 2002 and the business was losing money. AGL announced that Dingo Blue would stop providing calls and dial-up internet at 5.00 pm on 30 May 2002, with everything wound up by the end of June.

~ the dossier ~

~ the gas company years ~

AGL was founded in 1837 to light the streets of Sydney with gas. The reasoning behind buying a telephone brand in 2000 was the reasoning every utility in the world had that year, that a company already sending a household a monthly bill for one thing could put a second thing on the same piece of paper at almost no cost. Energy retailers across several countries tried some version of this, and almost none of them made it work, because a discount phone plan is not a product that a gas billing department knows how to sell.

AGL wrote off close to twice what it had paid. It also went after Optus, claiming about $85 million for breach of warranty in the sale agreement and for misleading and deceptive conduct. That is an unusually direct thing for one large company to say in public about another, and it tells you what AGL believed it had been shown about the business before signing.

~ what a flagfall was ~

Flagfall came from taxi meters, where the flag dropped when the trip began and the fare started at a number above zero. Australian carriers used the same word for the connection fee on every call, and a brand promising no flagfall was making a promise you could check on your own bill. Pricing in 1999 was still a thing you read in words rather than a thing you got told was simple by an app.

~ the mobile that stayed on ~

After May 2002 the phone and internet businesses were gone but dingoblue.com.au stayed up, and its front page carried a curious line: Dingo Blue intended to keep providing GSM mobile services until certain matters arising out of the acquisition had been resolved, and would give at least six weeks notice before stopping. Those matters were the lawsuit. The mobile customers were being kept connected because switching them off while suing the seller would have weakened the claim.

The suit settled in the week of 15 September 2003, with Optus paying AGL $23 million, one million dollars more than AGL had paid for the company in the first place. The notice went up the same week, exactly six weeks of warning as promised, and Dingo Blue ceased supplying mobile services to all customers at 5.00 pm Eastern Standard Time on 31 October 2003. Anybody who had not moved to another provider by then was transferred automatically to RSLCOM Mobile, a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus, which is to say they were handed back to the company that had created the brand four years earlier. By mid-2004 the website was a single line of text with a phone number in it.

~ the dial tone in another country ~

None of this shape was available in Turkey at the time. Competition here arrived at the internet layer first, so you could pick between TTNet and Superonline for your dial-up while the dial tone itself stayed with Türk Telekom, and the idea of buying your home phone line from your gas supplier would have sounded like a joke about a country with too many companies in it. What an Australian household could shop for in 1999 was a different list from the one we had, and the list is the interesting part rather than the prices on it.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »