Eurotel

» see eurotel.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Eurotel Praha won its licenses before it was a company. On 16 November 1990 it was granted an exclusive five-year license for a public data network and a twenty-year license in the 450 MHz band for an analog NMT mobile network, along with an automatic claim on a GSM license for a digital system nobody in the country was running yet. It was legally founded on 9 April 1991. The Czech state operator SPT Telecom held 51 percent of it and an American consortium called Atlantic West held the other 49. Eurotel's own website always dated the company from the license rather than from the founding, which tells you which of the two it thought mattered.

The network went live on 12 September 1991, and the first mobile call made in Czechoslovakia was a ceremonial one from the Wallenstein Palace in Prague to New York, placed by the United States ambassador, Shirley Temple Black. The first paying call came three weeks later, on 1 October. Slovak accounts of that same day name a different first call, between the chairs of the Czech and Slovak national councils, which is probably the Bratislava sibling's launch story rather than Prague's.

What a phone cost in 1991 is the detail that explains how small this was at the start. Contemporary reporting puts a handset between sixty thousand and a hundred and twenty thousand crowns, about sixteen average monthly salaries by one account, with thirty thousand more to get it connected, fifteen hundred a month in line rental, twenty-five crowns a minute to call out and eight crowns a minute to receive. Eurotel signed sixty-one thousand customers in its first five years. Then it launched GSM on 1 July 1996, the first in the country, and prepaid credit under the Go brand on 6 November 1997, and the market stopped being a luxury good. It added more than a million customers in the year 2000 alone and peaked at 4,676,000 at the end of 2005.

Ownership then changed hands twice, and both transactions were large. In June 2003 Atlantic West agreed to sell its 49 percent to Český Telecom and the conditions were met on 4 December, for just over a billion dollars, funded with what the Czech press called the largest corporate loan in the country's history to that point, twenty-seven billion crowns from a syndicate of fifteen banks. Then the state sold its own 51 percent of Český Telecom to Telefónica, a sale the cabinet approved on 7 April 2005 for 82.6 billion crowns, beating bids from Swisscom and Belgacom. A Spanish company with a global consumer brand now owned the whole thing.

~ the dossier ~

~ two separate endings ~

Eurotel died twice in one summer and the Czech commentator Jiří Peterka was careful to keep them apart. On 1 July 2006 the company merged into Český Telecom, which renamed itself Telefónica O2 Czech Republic the same day, and Eurotel Praha formally ceased to exist. The brands were deliberately left standing for another two months.

Then on 1 September 2006 both of them went. Peterka published that morning and noted that Český Telecom was dying for the second time, this time as a trademark, and that Eurotel was going with it. There is a small comedy in the files from that week: Telefónica did not own o2.cz when it launched the O2 brand, so the new official Czech site had to go up at cz.o2.com instead. The domain it wanted was in somebody else's hands, and so was o2tv.cz, which at the time was serving a rival video-on-demand offer.

~ the network under the signal bar ~

The analog network died the same day the company did. Eurotel had announced in May 2006 that it was ending the voice services built on NMT, which it had been running since September 1991, because it wanted the whole 450 MHz band for CDMA data instead. Mobilmania reported on 2 July that the switch-off had happened the previous day, and said so on the strength of what users were seeing rather than an operator announcement, which is why the Czech encyclopedia hedges this one to July 2006 without a day.

What those users described is worth writing down. The signal strength indicator on an NMT handset stayed lit after the voice service stopped, because the bars were now reading the CDMA data network sitting in the same band. The phone showed coverage and could not place a call. The voice service that ran on that network was branded T!P.

~ what czechs still say ~

Eurotel's slogan was Více ze života, more out of life, set to a Death in Vegas track and later to Hooverphonic. Its Christmas prepaid campaign produced a line, Go Ježíšku, go, that passed into ordinary Czech speech far enough that a rock band's parody of it ended up as an item on the television news. The logo sat on Sparta Prague's shirts from 1999 to 2003 for about a million euros a year. There is a transmitter tower in Prague that Wikimedia still files under the Eurotel name.

In January 2026 O2 put the slogan back into its own advertising, and its marketing director said plainly that the reference to Eurotel's being first was the reason. The brand had been off the market for two decades and the tagline attached to it was still worth using.

Ask eurotel.cz for a page today and nothing answers, because the zone exists and publishes no address at all. The registrant is O2 Czech Republic, the nameservers are O2's own, the record was last touched in January 2025, and the registration is paid up until 27 October 2027. Twenty years after switching the name off, the company that killed it is still quietly renewing the headstone.

~ the untranslated part ~

Shirley Temple Black placed that call when I was seven, and no part of the Czech mobile market was visible from Turkey at any point afterward. Turkey got its own operators under names that meant nothing outside the country, on handsets that cost more than anyone sensible would spend, so the shape of the story is close enough that I can read the Czech version without much translation. The part that does not translate is the ownership: a state telecom holding 51 percent of a mobile network and two American carriers holding the rest, which is a 1991 arrangement and belongs to that specific year in that specific part of Europe.

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