Dolphin Telecom

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

~ the last words ~

Dolphin Telecom plc was registered in England as company 03517203, with an address on an industrial estate in Basingstoke and the words "Holding Company" typed against its name on the form. What it held was an attempt to build a fourth mobile network across Europe out of a radio standard the emergency services use. Its owner was Telesystem International Wireless of Montreal, a Canadian holding company that at the same moment ran GSM operators in Romania and the Czech Republic and had cellular interests as far out as India and China.

The plan was digital specialized mobile radio. Dolphin took over the old analog trunked-radio operators in Britain, ran analog services in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, and set about replacing all of it with TETRA, a European digital standard designed for dispatch work: a courier fleet or a construction site. The UK network went live in August 1999. By 2001 Dolphin had built 1,075 cells with 1,019 of them in service, covered roughly ninety percent of the British population and carried about 272,000 subscribers, which made it the largest public mobile radio operator in Europe.

Turkey never had this argument. The fourth-operator question here was fought on the GSM side and resolved by merger, with Aria and Aycell folding into each other to become Avea instead of grinding each other down. Trunked radio here stayed what it is elsewhere, a thing site foremen and taxi dispatchers use that nobody would call a phone, and no Turkish operator tried to sell it to the public as a network. Looking at Dolphin from here, the odd part is not that it failed. It is that the attempt ran up something like 1.2 billion dollars of debt before anyone stopped it.

~ the record ~

~ what tetra was for ~

TETRA is good at the things GSM was bad at in 1999. You get a push-to-talk group call that sets up in a fraction of a second, and you get direct handset-to-handset operation when there is no network within reach. Those two properties are why emergency services across Europe standardized on it and why the standard is still in service a quarter of a century later.

What TETRA was not built for was being a consumer product. The handsets were expensive and heavy, the data rates were low, and the whole proposition assumed somebody was buying on a fleet contract rather than for themselves. Dolphin was selling a worse telephone at a higher price to customers who already owned working radios, in precisely the years when GSM handsets were becoming cheap enough to hand out free with a tariff. The company lost 226 million pounds in the first three months of 2001.

~ the petition it filed against itself ~

An administration order was made over Dolphin Telecom plc on 27 July 2001 and printed in the London Gazette on 3 August, naming A P Beveridge of Kroll Buchler Phillips on Grosvenor Street as joint administrator. Ten days later the operating companies followed on a single notice, Dolphin Telecommunications Limited among them. A creditors' meeting was called for 14 September. The French arm went into administration on 6 September, and the regulator there eventually threw its VHF and UHF frequencies open for reallocation.

The ending is in the Gazette of 27 December 2001 and it is a strange document. The petition to wind up Dolphin Telecom plc was presented on 19 December by Dolphin Telecom plc, acting through its own joint administrators, who had run out of anything else to do with it. The Royal Courts of Justice heard the matter on 14 January 2002 and made the order. The network outlasted the company: the UK TETRA business was sold for around 25 million pounds to Inquam, a Qualcomm joint venture, and kept transmitting under new owners. The final meeting of creditors was advertised in March 2005, and dolphintelecom.com sits on HugeDomains today, priced for whoever wants it.

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