Orange UK

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

~ the obit ~

The company called Orange UK ceased to exist on 1 April 2010. The brand kept selling contracts for another five years and kept serving customers for another nine, which is why the death date on this page is 2019 and not 2010. In early 2019 the people still sitting on an old Orange price plan were written to and told they had until March to pick an EE tariff. After that the service stopped. That letter is the actual end of Orange in Britain.

It started as a consortium with a worse name. Microtel Communications was put together in 1990 by Pactel, British Aerospace, Millicom and Matra, ended up wholly owned by BAe, and won a license to build a personal communications network. In July 1991 Hutchison Whampoa took a 65 percent controlling stake through a stock swap, and BAe took 30 percent of Hutchison Telecommunications UK in return. Hutchison renamed the thing Orange Personal Communications Services on 28 March 1994, and the 1800 MHz GSM network went live a month later on 28 April.

What followed was fast even by the standards of 1990s telecoms. Orange plc was floated in April 1996 on both the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, with Hutchison holding 48.22 percent and British Aerospace 21.1 percent. In June 1996 it became the youngest company to enter the FTSE 100, valued at £2.4 billion. One million customers had signed up by July 1997. Hans Snook ran it through that stretch and the 2G network eventually reached 99 percent of the UK population.

None of it reached Turkey. France Telecom took the Orange name worldwide after 2000 and put it on networks from Poland to Romania, but Turkish mobile in those years was Turkcell and Telsim, with Aria and Aycell merging into Avea in 2004. The only part of Orange that made it here was the sentence, which turned up in design writing and in marketing coursework as the example everyone used. I knew the slogan a decade before I could have told you which country the network was in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the launch campaign ~

Naming a phone company after a color was strange enough in 1994 that it is still taught. The brand was built by a team at Microtel led by marketing director Chris Moss, supported by Martin Keogh along with Rob Furness and Ian Pond. Wolff Olins designed the identity, which came out as a plain square of orange with lowercase white type in it and nothing else. WCRS wrote the line: the future's bright, the future's Orange.

The reason it worked is that none of it described telephones. Every competitor was selling coverage maps and per-minute rates. Orange sold an adjective, in a market where the competition was called Cellnet and Mercury One2One, and the name turned out to be portable in a way that a technical brand never is. France Telecom eventually paid tens of billions of dollars partly for that portability.

~ sold three times inside a year ~

The public-company stint ended in October 1999 when Mannesmann AG, a German conglomerate that had started out making steel tubes, bought Orange for about $33 billion. That purchase is what triggered everything after it. Vodafone had been circling Mannesmann and the Orange deal pushed it into a hostile bid, which closed in February 2000 at roughly $183 billion.

Vodafone now owned two UK mobile licenses and European competition rules would not let it keep both, so Orange went straight back on the market. France Telecom announced the purchase in May 2000 at about $37 billion and completed it that August. Then it did the thing that made the whole sequence pay: it retired its own mobile brands across Europe and put the Orange name on all of them. A British startup's identity became the retail face of the French state telephone monopoly.

~ the last ten percent ~

France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom announced merger talks for their UK arms on 8 September 2009. The European Commission approved it on 1 March 2010 on condition the combined company sold a quarter of its 1800 MHz spectrum and reworked its network-sharing deal with 3. The merger closed on 1 April 2010, Orange UK and T-Mobile UK both ceased to exist as companies, and on 11 May the parent was named EE. The Orange home broadband service was folded into EE Broadband that October.

Both retail brands stayed on the high street anyway, because about 19 million people were on them. EE announced the end on 2 February 2015: no more Orange or T-Mobile contracts through its own channels, with indirect partners stopping on 2 March. Chief commercial officer Marc Allera explained the timing in plain arithmetic. EE had taken 92 percent of new connections across December and January, and by his account only one customer in ten was still connecting to Orange or T-Mobile. The company had deliberately waited for that number before pulling the trigger.

Existing customers were allowed to stay on their plans indefinitely, just not to upgrade. That is how a brand ends up with a four-year afterlife: nobody was pushed off, and the ones who stayed were the ones who never wanted a new handset. The final notice went out in early 2019 and the last Orange service in the United Kingdom was switched off that March, twenty-five years less a month after the network opened.

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