T-Orange? A history of 2 very average networks

With the merger of the original GSM 1800 networks both of which launched in the UK in the early 1990's one has to ask what now?
When Mercury one2one launched in late 1993 in the London area initially before it expanded the network was slated for its poor reception and poor choice of handsets. Yet it still attracted thousands of customers, why? It offered something fresh to the market - the word FREE. Free calls to local land line numbers between 7pm and 7am Monday to Friday and all weekends and Bank holidays. The network also gave the option of cheap calls to your own Postal code area on a subscription basis. I still know of many individuals who have kept the personal tariff although rarely use it now. Cable and Wireless who then owned Mercury one2one's launch in the mobile market was at a time when GSM was new, Voda and Cellnet were still connecting the majority on the now defunct Analogue network with per minute billing, and little in the way of creature comforts we now expect from our networks.
The following spring Hutchison launched Orange a new network which went in straight to lock heads with Vodafone and Cellnet as an alternative business network. They offered 2hour replacement insurance on their handsets, had SMS, inclusive minute bundles and per second billing and oh yeah 12 month contracts!
Both one2one and Orange continued in offering something different to the norm and slowly started to become major players in the market. That is until C&W sold off one2one and Hutchsion sold off Orange. The innovative Orange was now just moving along with the flow, rarely doing anything interesting and becoming more and more like the network we all moan about today. One2one was sold to Deutch Telecom and then became rebranded to T-Mobile. Offering not much new but aiming at the low end market with tariffs for those on a budget. Although T-Mobile have introduced new functionality to its network they have also taken away things too. Like Voicemail being chargeable at outside your bundle minutes or charging 40p per minute for 0800 calls. On the plus side the Flext Tariffs were a real hit when they first came out, offering the the consumer the choice of minutes and text usage as they wished. MMS not included! Then in the last few years T-Mobile have blown all their budget on acquisitions and poor customers who want to negotiate their expiring contracts are told to wait till the new year.

So what happens when 2 quite average/poor networks merge? do they become a good network? or just a big mess? I personally believe it is the latter. I for some reason cannot see that the networks merging will improve their perception in consumer eyes. Only Hutchison 3 has a worse reputation it seems! I heard that T-Mobile will become the equivalent to the Tesco Extra Value products, cheap sometimes cheerful and the Orange brand will become the posher of the two.
As a dealer i don't really care, as long as they stop poaching our customers, offering silly online deals for direct sales only and keep us in the loop for things I wouldn't care if they renamed themselves as Piss up in a Brewery!

Direct Channel Woes!

When the direct channel, was opened shops it was purely as a brand marketing exercise, now days its a major stream of income. I personally don't have too much of an issue with that. What i do have an issue is with the crazy offerings they offer the customers, making our lives a lot harder. Then the networks have the cheek and say the independent dealer market is very important to us! Bollocks it is! The worst offenders have to be 3 and T-Mobile, crazy deals silly line rentals discounts it makes one wonder why we don't have that flexibility. I pop into various phone stores now and then and have a chin wag with them get a kind of low down but also to network with them. A retailer in West London gets a huge amount of their unlocking referrals from the direct channel stores and even the CPW guys. Is the Independent Dealer soon going to be extinct? Well i see it happening in the next few years. Reading on the Mobile News website about a B2B dealer pulling the plug sent shivers down my spine. There he is, a well established dealer who has pulled the plug and there is me new to the game, struggling to get the connections, struggling to find a site for my shop, struggling full stop. Do i carry on or shall i call it quits and look at something else?

The futures bright the futures so not IPhone!

Ok i knew there wouldn't be a price war but hey did Orange really think they could copy and paste the O2 tariffs for the IPhone modify it slightly and get away without debate? Muppets! Let me make it clear, i don't think that the O2 tariffs are really that bad, OK the £30 a month tariff giving the customer a measly 75 mins is a piss take but lets be honest unless you are seriously short of £90 over 18 months and only use the IPhone to call your favourite take away on Friday nights then you wouldn't sign up to that bundle and pay a lot for the IPhone. 200 minutes would be the bench mark for the low tariff. What Orange have essentially done, is opened the IPhone to the public by saying if you don't like O2 come to us and we will take your money instead. But apart from apparently having the highest 3G coverage they don't have anything else to offer. They even cap the data to 750mb. What Vodafone will offer is something to wait for.