Telfort

» see telfort.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Telfort was formed in 1997 by British Telecommunications and Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the Dutch national railway, which is an unusual pair of parents for a GSM operator. It sold itself as the cheapest option in the Netherlands and went to real trouble to look the part. Being cheap was the product, and looking plain while doing it was the advertising.

The ownership changed hands more often than the product did. BT bought out the railway's stake in 2000 and folded the business into BT Wireless. That unit was spun off as mmO2, under which the Dutch operation was renamed O2 Netherlands, and the arrangement lasted until April 2003, when mmO2 sold it to the private equity firm Greenfield Capital Partners for 25 million euros. The Dutch competition authority cleared the sale at the end of May and the company changed hands on 3 June, whereupon it went back to calling itself Telfort.

KPN bought it in July 2005, with about 2.4 million customers attached, which took the incumbent to roughly 20 million mobile users. KPN kept the name and used it the way incumbents use a second brand. Tiscali's Dutch internet business, bought in 2007, was rebranded Telfort Internet that October, and fixed lines and television were layered underneath. By 2018 Telfort had stopped being a company at all and was only a word that KPN owned.

None of this reached me. Telfort was a domestic brand in a market where I have never had a phone number, and the only Dutch provider whose name reached my part of the internet was XS4ALL, which got there on its politics rather than on its pricing.

~ the case file ~

~ the railway and the phone company ~

A national railway is a stranger entry on a telecom license than it first looks. Railways own long thin strips of land across an entire country with masts standing along them, plus an operational radio network they already run for their own trains. Put that next to a foreign telephone company with money and spectrum experience and you have the two halves of a mobile operator. Nederlandse Spoorwegen held its share for three years and then sold it to BT in 2000, which is roughly how long it takes to discover that running a consumer phone brand is a different business from running trains.

The name itself was deleted once before KPN got to it. After the mmO2 spin-off the Dutch business traded as O2, and the Telfort brand sat unused until a private equity buyer picked the company up and decided the old name was worth more than the new one. It got a second life in June 2003 and a second death sixteen years later.

~ twenty-five million euros ~

The 2003 price is the number worth keeping. A national mobile operator with its own network and its own customers went for 25 million euros, which reads like a typo and was not one. mmO2 was shedding everything that was not the British business, and the Dutch operation was the kind of asset that gets sold at whatever price makes it go away.

Marcel Boekhoorn's investment vehicle Ramphastos took a 52 percent position the following year, leaving Greenfield and the management with the rest. When KPN bought the business in July 2005 the buyout trade press reckoned Greenfield had made more than fifty times its money on a hold of roughly two years.

~ the last day you could buy one ~

KPN said on 10 January 2019 that it was going to put everything behind one brand. Telfort was named in that decision and so was XS4ALL, which is how two completely different companies with completely different customers were sentenced in the same sentence.

Telfort stopped taking new customers on 1 May 2019 and the shops closed the same day. The mobile brand came off the market on 26 January 2020, with the remaining subscriptions moved across on the 25th and the 26th. Migration of the fixed VDSL customers started that September. Nobody lost service at any point in this; the brand was removed from around people while they kept their line.

Telecompaper went back through the numbers in the middle of 2020 and found that about 43 percent of the Telfort customers had ended up on KPN. The rest went somewhere else, which is the predictable result of spending 22 years telling people the only reason to be here is the price.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »