SUNDAY Communications

» see sunday.com.hk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Mandarin Communications Limited was incorporated in Hong Kong in 1994 and switched on in 1997, trading under a brand that was simply a day of the week. SUNDAY ran GSM and later added 3G and fixed line service into one of the most heavily contested mobile markets anywhere, a territory you can cross in an hour with several operators selling into it at once. A late entrant there competes on marketing, because there is no coverage map left to win on.

The corporate shape was of its era. The operating company sat under Sunday Communications Limited, which was incorporated in the Cayman Islands while running out of Hong Kong. It listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong in March 2000, with Distacom Communications and USI Holdings among the shareholders behind it. A Cayman holding over a Hong Kong network, floated at the top of the telecom bubble.

PCCW bought the majority stake in 2005 through a vehicle called PCCW Mobile Holding No.2 Limited. In an intra-group transaction after that, Sunday sold Mandarin Communications and its other businesses to PCCW for about 1.9435 billion Hong Kong dollars, and the holding company was delisted in 2006. For a while the two brands ran side by side in an arrangement that reads strangely on paper: SUNDAY kept selling 2G under its own name while PCCW resold 3G airtime that SUNDAY's own network supplied.

~ the record ~

~ the handover ~

That arrangement did not last. In 2007 Mandarin Communications was renamed PCCW Mobile HK, the Sunday Communications holding company was dissolved, and the SUNDAY retail stores were converted into PCCW exclusive stores on the same day. Bill payment, plan changes, handset sales, prepaid cards, all of it carried on at the same counters under a different logo.

Seven years later the name on the legal entity changed again. HKT reacquired CSL in December 2013, and in 2014 PCCW Mobile HK Limited became CSL Mobile Limited. The company that started life as Mandarin in 1994 has now outlived two of its own brands without ever once shutting down the network.

~ the server nobody turned off ~

You can watch the brand die in the archive of its own domain. On 14 January 2007 sunday.com.hk was still serving a full customer site, around six kilobytes of markup with My Account and an eShop in the navigation. The next capture, 8 May 2007, is 2,205 bytes long and says, in its entirety, welcome to hp-ux web server suite.

That is the default page of an HP-UX machine with nothing published on it. Somebody pulled the site down and left the web server running, and it kept answering that way through January 2008 and beyond. Today there is nothing at that address, not even a host.

~ what the name was for ~

A network that only ever sold inside one territory is hard to have an opinion about from outside it, and I do not have a SUNDAY story. What carries across borders is the shape: a late licensee spends a decade making noise and is bought in the end by an incumbent that was always going to outlast it.

Naming a phone network after a day of the week was a deliberately soft move in a market full of hard technical branding, and it held up for a decade in the hands of a challenger that was never going to outspend the incumbents. Craig Ehrlich, who ran it as managing director, went on to chair the GSM Association. The network he built is still carrying traffic in Hong Kong. It just answers to CSL now, and before that to PCCW, and the word SUNDAY has not been on a shopfront there since 2007.

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