Orange Austria

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

~ the obituary ~

Austria licensed its third mobile operator to a joint venture of Mannesmann and the Danish incumbent TDC, under the corporate name Connect Austria, and the service went live on 26 October 1998 as ONE. It was the first network in the country to run in the DCS 1800 band rather than at 900 MHz, which mattered technically and mattered more commercially, because being the newcomer with the cheaper spectrum is a decent place to start a price war.

The ownership changed about as often as the branding. Vodafone took Mannesmann's seat in 2000 by buying Mannesmann outright, then sold that stake to the private equity firm Mid Europa Partners in 2007. France Telecom bought TDC's share in 2008, which gave the Austrian business the right to use the Orange name, and ONE was rebranded Orange on 22 September 2008. The customers kept their 0699 numbers and the network underneath was the same one that had launched ten years earlier.

Hutchison Whampoa announced on 3 February 2012 that it would buy the whole thing for about $1.7 billion. Brussels made it sell the discount subsidiary YESSS! to Telekom Austria as the price of approval, and the deal closed on 3 January 2013, producing a combined operator with roughly 2.8 million customers. Hutchison already had a brand in Austria. It was called Drei, and it had launched as the only pure UMTS operator in the country.

~ the case file ~

~ the blue newspaper ~

The launch is the part worth keeping. 26 October is the Austrian national holiday, and on that day in 1998 the copies of Der Standard sitting in the self-service boxes on the street were printed on pale blue paper. Der Standard is printed on pink paper, in the manner of the Financial Times, so turning the whole paper light blue for one morning was an advertisement nobody could miss or skip.

That is a confident way to introduce a telephone company, and the confidence held up. The company claimed 98.6 percent GSM population coverage by the end. In 2004 it picked up extra spectrum at 900 MHz to run EDGE over, and in March 2010, working with Ericsson at a test site in Wiener Neustadt, it became the first Austrian operator to put 42 Mbit/s into its HSPA network.

~ nineteen august ~

The brand ran under Hutchison ownership for seven months before the switch. On 19 August 2013 the company held a press conference in Vienna and did two things at once: it replaced Orange in the market with Drei, and it relaunched Drei itself as a merged proposition with a new slogan, Es geht auch anders. The product systems of both operators had been unified behind the scenes in the months before, which is why the public part could happen on a single date.

Hutchison's own announcement that day has a section headed Abschied von Orange, farewell to Orange, and it says the brand is disappearing from view. Jan Trionow, the chief executive, said the era of Orange in Austria was now ending, and added that the two companies had had very similar stories and a similar spirit, which is a generous thing for the survivor to say and also obviously true. Both of them had spent years being the alternative to Telekom Austria.

~ the number stayed ~

For the people holding the phones this was the least eventful death imaginable. The press release is explicit that Orange customers needed to do nothing at all. They kept their tariff and they kept their number, and from that morning on they were calling and browsing on Drei. The 0699 prefix stayed attached to the numbers that already had it. The only things switched off that day were the logo and the sign above the shop.

Austria is not a market I have ever been a subscriber in, and the Orange square I associate with the brand is the one from the UK and France rather than Vienna. The shape is familiar from the other end, though. Turkey ran three mobile operators through those same years and the smallest of them changed hands and names more than once, so the sequence needs no translation: the challenger brand that spent fifteen years being the interesting one gets bought by the other challenger, and then exactly one of the two names continues.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »