Telsim

» see telsim.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

For about a decade in Turkey a mobile number told you exactly one fact before it told you anything else, and that fact was the prefix. 0532 meant Turkcell. 0542 meant Telsim. Calls across the two networks cost more than calls inside one of them, so people asked which operator a number was on before they saved it, and the question was not idle. Telsim was the cheaper one, and the cheaper one is a different kind of company: it never had the coverage argument, so it competed on the bill.

It started as Teknotel in 1993, was licensed in February 1994 and carried its first traffic that May, owned by the Uzan family, whose holdings at the time also included a national television channel and, later, a political party that ran in a general election. By 1995 it had sixteen thousand subscribers. By 2005 it had 9.7 million and a debt that had made it internationally famous. The auction that ended it was, at the time, the largest single sale of a Turkish company to a foreign buyer.

Nothing about this one is at a distance and it is the closest a network can get to a household fact. What I did not have was any say in it. Through the years when the prefix mattered most, a line in a Turkish family was a bill somebody else paid, and the operator on it was decided by whoever was signing for it and what the tariff looked like that month. Telsim's entire proposition was price, which meant its customer was never the person holding the handset. It was the person budgeting for it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ switched off for eight months ~

The strangest fact in the company's history is that the network stopped. On 27 November 1995, in the middle of a fight over the legal basis of its license, Telsim went dark and stayed dark until 1 August 1996. Eight months with no service on a network people were already carrying phones for.

It came back and then operated in a legal gray zone for nearly two more years, until a 25-year GSM license was finally issued on 27 April 1998 alongside the telecoms privatization. A company that had already demonstrated it could be switched off by an argument in Ankara was not going to win the trust half of the market. It got the price half instead.

~ the two billion dollars ~

Building a national network means buying a very large amount of equipment, and the way Telsim bought it was on vendor credit from Motorola and Nokia, somewhere near two billion dollars of it. Then it did not pay. What followed was years of litigation in New York, in which a US district court found that the owners had run what it called a massive fraud in obtaining the loans, with damages originally set at 2.13 billion dollars and later cut roughly in half on appeal.

The detail that makes it worse is the collateral. Shares pledged against the loans were diluted to near worthlessness by issuing new stock, so the security the lenders held turned into almost nothing while the equipment stayed installed and switched on. Every call made on that network from the late 1990s onward ran across hardware that had, in a real sense, not been bought.

~ what the fund was selling ~

The Savings Deposit Insurance Fund took the company into state receivership in February 2004, which in Turkey is what happens when a group's bank fails and the rest of the holdings follow. The fund then had an unusual asset on its hands: a functioning national mobile network with ten million customers, carrying an unpaid vendor debt large enough to have produced a court judgment in another country against the family that used to own it.

It sold it anyway. The auction concluded in December 2005 and Vodafone bid 4.55 billion dollars, with an arrangement that routed a share of the proceeds to Motorola and Nokia, at least 400 million to one and at least 100 million to the other. The handover completed on 24 May 2006. The lenders got paid out of the sale of the thing their money had built, roughly a decade late.

~ the dual-brand winter ~

The name did not go immediately. From the start of 2007 the network ran as Telsim Vodafone, two logos side by side on the shopfronts, which is what a company does when it has bought ten million people's phone service and does not want to startle them. The retail signage swap finished on 31 March 2007 and the network became Vodafone Türkiye on 1 April.

The archive brackets it neatly. On 9 October 2006 telsim.com.tr was still serving a page whose title tag read TELSİM, over a gold header bar and a stack of three logos in one GIF. By 6 April 2007 the same address was serving Vodafone. There was no farewell page at any point, just new letters on the same doors.

The address is still Vodafone's and it still half works, which is the better artifact. telsim.com.tr resolves to a host whose response header reads Server: VF, and a plain request there gets a permanent redirect to the secure version of itself. The secure version then presents a certificate issued to www.vodafone.com.tr, held by Vodafone Group Services Limited of Newbury, which does not match the name you typed, so any browser refuses to continue. Somebody is still paying to keep a dead Turkish brand pointed at a British company's server, and has been for nineteen years without once fixing the certificate.

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