Sun Cellular

» see suncellular.com.ph as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Philippines spent the 2000s as the most text-message-heavy country on earth, with two networks dividing the business between them. Digitel got its permit from the National Telecommunications Commission on 7 August 2000 and set up Digitel Mobile Philippines the month after. A permanent franchise arrived through Republic Act No. 9180 on 11 December 2002, and the service launched as Sun Cellular on 3 March 2003.

What it sold was unlimited calling and texting to other Sun numbers for a flat monthly fee. Smart and Globe had been charging per message, which was lucrative in a country where the message was the whole social life of a teenager, and they had to answer. Sun grew to just over 14 million subscribers by the end of 2010, which made the market a genuine three-way fight for the first time.

Then the fight was bought. PLDT, which already owned Smart, paid 69.2 billion pesos in 2011 for a majority holding in Digitel and inherited Sun along with it. For a while the two networks ran as separate operations with their own infrastructure and their own management. PLDT's chairman said publicly that the unlimited and bucket pricing of Sun would be maintained, and it was, for about a decade.

~ the dossier ~

~ unlimited ~

The catch in unlimited was the word on-net. Your flat fee covered calls and messages to other people on the same network, so the offer only worked if the people you talked to every day were also on Sun. This is why the Philippine habit of carrying two SIM cards hardened in exactly these years. One number was where your family was and the other was where your friends were, and the phones that sold best were the ones with two slots.

The effect on prices was real and permanent. Once one operator proves that a bucket of calls can be sold for a fixed monthly number, the per-message meter stops being defensible and the whole market has to move to bundles. Sun came third into a market of two and still set the price for both of them.

~ the goodbye in two parts ~

PLDT retired the brand in halves, eighteen months apart. On 21 October 2020 it announced that Sun's prepaid service had finished rebranding into Smart Prepaid. Subscribers kept their Sun numbers and woke up on a different brand with a larger catalog of promos. Postpaid carried on alone under the Sun name until the spring of 2022.

On 25 April 2022 Sun Postpaid merged into Smart Postpaid and every Sun plan and add-on stopped being offered. Smart's own page told anyone thinking of subscribing to Sun to take a Smart Signature plan instead, while existing subscribers could keep what they had or upgrade. Nineteen years after the launch the brand stopped being purchasable, and nobody published a farewell.

I was in a market on the other side of Asia where texting was also the cheap thing and the bundle was also the battleground, so the shape of this argument reads clearly from here even if the company never did. The difference is that in the Philippines the challenger won the argument and then got bought by the loser's owner, and the price it had forced on the market outlived the name by years.

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