Mercury Communications

» see mercury.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mercury's name came off the network in 1997, a year ahead of my own first modem. None of it is a memory for me, it is something I read about later and had to place: a second British phone company, built on purpose, by law, to give the country somewhere else to call from. Turkey had one PTT and nobody pretended otherwise, so the idea that a government would manufacture a competitor was genuinely foreign.

The setup was 1981. Cable & Wireless put money into a consortium called Mercury Communications Ltd alongside Barclays and BP, with Sir Michael Edwardes as its first chairman, fresh from turning British Leyland around. The license followed in 1982 and full Public Telecommunications Operator status in 1984, which is the year Cable & Wireless bought out its two partners and owned the whole thing. The Thatcher government was privatizing British Telecom at the same time, and Mercury existed so that the newly private BT would have something to be privatized against.

What it actually sold, for most of its life, was a cheaper long-distance call on somebody else's wire. You kept your BT line. You dialed 131, then a ten digit customer code, then the number. Later it got easier: 132 and the number, no code. Some phones shipped with a dedicated Mercury button that stored the whole prefix for you.

~ the record ~

~ dialing 131 ~

Mercury never seriously threatened BT on residential lines and was not really built to. Its business was corporate traffic and wholesale: by the end of January 1993 it was supplying over 117,000 telephone lines to cable operators, who sold phone service alongside television and leaned on Mercury's backbone to carry it. It had alliances with sixteen UK cable companies. In November 1992 Cable & Wireless sold a 20 percent stake to Canada's BCE for about 480 million pounds, partly for the money and partly because BCE knew how to run a telephone company.

It moved into private exchanges in 1990 when Cable & Wireless bought Telephone Rentals, which let Mercury hang its Smart Box off a large installed base and pull that traffic off BT. It sold the exchange business to Siemens in 1996.

~ the payphones nobody wanted ~

From 1986 Mercury ran its own public payphones against BT's, and those boxes are what survives in photographs today. They were notable for designs that imitated architectural styles instead of following one national shape, which was charming and almost completely beside the point, because a payphone is only worth anything if it is where you happen to be standing. They did not prove profitable and the business was sold in 1995.

~ the year the name went ~

The mobile side outlived the brand. Mercury Personal Communications won a license in July 1991 and launched as Mercury One2One in 1993, Britain's first GSM 1800 network, opening inside the M25 with free off-peak calls to local landlines. Those SIM cards became collectors' items later because the free-calls terms kept working long after the plan stopped being sold. One2One went to Deutsche Telekom in 1999 for 8.4 billion pounds and became T-Mobile in 2002.

The parent did not get that ending. In October 1996 Cable & Wireless agreed to merge Mercury with three cable operators into a single company called Cable & Wireless Communications, holding 53 percent of it. Videotron and Bell Cablemedia came in alongside NYNEX CableComms, whose shareholders approved the deal in April 1997, and the Mercury name went with the paperwork. Sources still disagree about whether to date the renaming to the 1996 announcement or the 1997 completion, which is a fitting amount of confusion for a company whose main product was a number you dialed before the number.

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