Omnitel

» see omnitel.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Omnitel Sistemi Radiocellulari Italiani was founded on 19 June 1990, nearly four years before there was anything for it to do. Italy had one mobile network and it belonged to the state telephone company. The GSM licence that made a second one possible was won in March 1994, and the commercial launch came in December 1995. Four months after that it had 130,000 customers, which sounds modest until you remember that in 1996 a mobile phone in Italy was still mostly a thing other people had.

Then the curve went vertical. Two million customers in 1997, six million at the end of 1998, and the count passed nine million on 28 October 1999. Revenue in 1998 was 4,464 billion lire and the company employed 5,553 people. The Italian figures from this period come mostly from the Italian Wikipedia rather than from a filing, and they are reported here as that. No measured market-share number survived checking, so none is printed.

The method is the interesting part. It competed on the structure of the bill rather than on coverage maps, which is what a second entrant has to do. On 1 June 2001 it launched tariffs billed by the second with no connection charge, and the Italian trade press covered the pricing mechanics the way other countries' press covered handsets. From 1999 the advertising carried Megan Gale, an Australian model whose Italian career started in those commercials.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the second network ~

The consortium behind it changed shape repeatedly, which is normal for European mobile in the 1990s and makes the ownership history hard to summarize honestly. Olivetti was in it, alongside Lehman Brothers and the American and Swedish carriers Bell Atlantic and Telia. The Pronto Italia side separately brought in AirTouch and Mannesmann and a long list of smaller Italian names. Mannesmann accumulated a controlling position by 1999. Then Vodafone bought Mannesmann, and Italy came with it.

From 1999 onward the decisions about the Italian brand were taken in Düsseldorf and then in Newbury, by owners who had bought their way in through a takeover of a German conglomerate.

~ the legal afterlife ~

The name came off in stages, and the stages are worth laying out because the final date looks arbitrary without them. From January 2001 it was Omnitel Vodafone. In October 2001 the Italian press reported that the word Omnitel would come off the display of the handsets themselves. By June 2002 the order had flipped to Vodafone Omnitel and the house color had gone from green to red. On 12 May 2003 a shareholders' meeting ratified dropping the word entirely, and Italian coverage names 12 May as the last day of the brand.

The corporation was slower. Vodafone Omnitel N.V., later B.V., carried the word on its registration until 22 November 2015, when it became Vodafone Italia S.p.A. and moved its registered office back into Italy. For twelve and a half years the registration carried a word that no customer could see anywhere.

~ from outside ~

The same experiment was running in Turkey on roughly the same timetable, with its own monopoly and its own second entrant, so the mechanics here are familiar to me while the brand is not. I never saw one of its bills. The green logo means nothing to me and apparently a great deal to anyone who was nineteen in Milan in 1997, which is the usual distribution for a mobile brand: enormous inside one border and invisible one country over.

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