eTel

» see etel.at as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

eTel Group was founded in Dublin in July 1999, which is the detail everyone gets wrong about it, because almost everything it did happened in Central Europe. Europe had just finished opening its telephone monopolies to competition, every country in Central Europe suddenly had room for a second and third operator, and eTel's plan was to be that operator in as many of them as it could afford: Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.

Austria became the center of it. In October 2001 eTel bought RSL COM Austria, the local arm of a collapsed American carrier, for a reported three million pounds. Then it merged in European Telecom International, which was Telefonica's Austrian business, and that deal closed in early 2003 with the combined company reporting around 42,000 business customers and over 85,000 private ones against 78 million euros of revenue for 2002. More purchases followed, including the Austrian EUnet in 2006, and by then eTel was the fourth largest operator in the country, with about 225,000 customers and a couple of hundred employees.

Fourth largest is a difficult place to stand. On 20 December 2006 Telekom Austria, the incumbent eTel had been taking customers from since 2001, announced it was buying the operating companies for about ninety million euros. The competition court cleared it in April 2007 on conditions, and the purchase closed on 26 April 2007. What happened after that was not a merger so much as a disassembly.

~ the case file ~

~ five countries, one brand ~

Telekom Austria kept Austria and got rid of the rest with some speed. The Czech company was dissolved into Czech On Line, with the register entry made on 27 September 2007, and the eTel name there was folded into the Volny brand. In January 2008 the Polish business went to MediaTel for 2.35 million euros plus a stake of about nine percent in the buyer, and the Hungarian one went to Interware for an undisclosed sum.

So the pan-European roll-up lasted under a year inside its new owner. Everything eTel had assembled on the argument that the same company should sell telephone service in five liberalized markets was taken apart by a buyer who wanted one of those markets and considered the other four someone else's problem.

~ the tariff list ~

The actual tombstone is still readable. On eTel's own website, captured in August 2008, Telekom Austria posted a Kundmachung, a formal public notice, under the heading of tariff discontinuation for eTel fixed-line products. It announces that the listed products stop on 15 August 2008, that affected customers are being told in writing, and that from that date the existing Telekom Austria tariff model applies instead. It gives an address at [email protected] and a free hotline for questions.

What makes it worth reading is the list itself, twenty-two tariffs named in full. Among them are eTel festnetz privat and eTel festnetz easy, and then a run of entries reading RSL COM 1011-okt99 and RSL COM 1011 Business Aug01. Customers were still being billed in 2008 on price plans named after an American long-distance company that had gone bankrupt and been swallowed seven years earlier. Nobody had ever bothered to rename them, because nobody renames a tariff that works.

~ what the incumbent bought ~

Turkey went through the same decade from the other side. The monopoly loosened, alternative providers appeared, and for a while in the early 2000s the question of which company your line belonged to had an actual answer beyond the obvious one. I was on TTNet for most of it and on Turknet and Superonline at other points, and the thing I remember is how quickly the choice narrowed again. The pattern eTel ran into repeats across every market that opened in those years. An incumbent with the copper in the ground can wait, and competitors arriving on borrowed infrastructure have a ceiling they tend to find around the fourth position.

Telekom Austria paid about ninety million euros for seven and a half years of that work, and the number says what it thought it was buying. Not a network, since eTel mostly resold access to one. A customer list and the end of somebody calling Austrian businesses to offer them a cheaper line.

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