Greenpoint

~ the goodbye ~

The handset was called Kermit, after the frog, until somebody at PTT Telecom looked at what Jim Henson's people wanted to renew the license and concluded that a national telephone network could not afford a Muppet. So the phone became the Greenhopper, which is the same joke with the legal exposure removed, and the network kept the name Greenpoint throughout. Of all the reasons a product gets renamed, character licensing costs is not one you see often on an infrastructure project.

Greenpoint went live in May 1992 and was sold on price. The Dutch car phone was expensive and this was not: one handset that behaved like an ordinary cordless phone against your own base station at home, and then kept working against roughly five thousand public base stations once you left the house. PTT put those boxes at railway stations and outside the V&D department stores, in the places where somebody standing still with a phone would not look strange.

The technology was CT2, the same European standard behind Bi-Bop in France and the four failed British telepoint services, running to ETSI spec I-ETS 300 131. Which means it inherited the same defect all of them had. Greenpoint could dial out and it could not be dialed. There was no mechanism for the network to know which base station you were near, so no incoming call could ever find you, and everybody who bought one signed up to that on day one.

It sits well outside my range. In 1992 I was eight, six years off my first modem, and the Netherlands was not a country whose consumer telecom ever crossed my path. What makes Greenpoint worth writing down anyway is that it is the one CT2 network that mostly worked. It lasted six and a half years, hit sixty thousand subscribers, and was closed on 1 January 1999 by a competitor rather than by its own failure.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually worked ~

The pager thing is the detail that explains the whole product. Because a Greenpoint phone could not receive calls, a meaningful number of subscribers carried a pager as well. Somebody would page you, you would look around for a green box, and you would walk over and call them back. Two devices to do the job of one, and people did it willingly for years, because the combination still cost less than a cellular subscription.

Reading that from 2026 it sounds absurd, and it was not. What Greenpoint sold was not mobility, it was the removal of the phone box queue and the phone box coin. The same handset that sat in your hall and rang like a normal phone also worked at the station, and that continuity was worth real money to people who mostly wanted to call home and say they were running late. The product was honest about its limits and the limits were priced in.

~ the rise and the drain ~

Peak was 1996 at around sixty thousand subscribers, which by Dutch population is a genuine consumer product rather than a curiosity. Then GSM arrived properly and the numbers went one direction only. By 1998 Greenpoint was down to roughly twenty thousand, and a network with five thousand base stations serving twenty thousand people is a network whose maintenance schedule has stopped making sense.

PTT closed it on 1 January 1999. Nobody had to be told why. A GSM phone rang wherever you were standing, and by 1998 it cost something a normal household would pay. Once the expensive option stops being expensive, a cheap option with a structural hole in it has nothing left to trade on, and that same sentence explains the death of every CT2 network in Europe.

~ what got buried with it ~

The hardware outlived the service by a long way. Dutch enthusiasts were still finding Greenpoint base station housings bolted to walls in 2007, eight years after the last call, because taking them down cost money and leaving them up cost nothing. A dead website leaves an empty domain and a dead radio network leaves objects, which is why the physical layer of internet history is easier to verify than the software layer.

CT2 itself went on to a long and successful second life as DECT, and DECT is still in millions of European homes right now. The standard won as soon as it stopped trying to be a public network and went back to being a cordless phone. Greenpoint spent six years proving that the outdoor version was a business you could run at small scale, and then GSM proved that nobody needed it run at all.

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