[@NickyColman]

Good evening ladies & gentlemen,

You join me here, on a warm mid-summers night, to discuss the death of -T-Mobile UK.

Many rumors and tall stories are currently whipping around the web like a wicked storm telling and retelling the tale of how -T-Mobile fell from grace! The vultures are now circling around the dead carcass waiting to make their move.

But lets take a look back, many moons ago, -T-Mobile was on a bold crusade throughout the mobile kingdom to pillage and plunder the stagnant world it was surrounded in.

-T-Mobile's honorable Sir William Web'n'Walk courted Lady Regina Flext and together they created superior tarrifs that the other kings struggled to match. Lashings of data and a treasure trove of 'allowance' to spend at a whim were all common place in -T-Mobile's kingdom.

3 years down the line, Lady Regina Flext is an old dried up woman and Sir William Web'n'Walk is dead.

But what was it that ultimately killed -T-Mobile?

[gorilla]

Could it be coverage? I wouldn't consider T-Mobile over here for that reason.

[Hands0n]

T-Mobile has long suffered at the accusation of having poor coverage. That may well have been very true in it's early One2One days. But since it's acquisition by Deutsche Telecom things did indeed improve.

Their 3G coverage has been tarred with the same brush, unfairly so in my opinion and direct experience. In use with a Nokia N95 I have never experienced poor or no service with T-Mobile where another network was available. To me, then, T-Mobile have an equivalent service, even at PCN and UMTS frequencies.

Flext was a wake up call to the other networks, some of whom responded in kind. Others replied, eventually, with appealing tariffs. Especially those who included huge or "unlimited" SMS bundles. Remember, SMS costs the networks £0.00 to handle. The infrastructure is a sunk cost to any mobile network.

Web n Walk was completely ahead of it's time! Now, with the likes of iPhone and it's "clones" the tariff is completely appropriate.

I also do not think that T-Mobile, in keeping with the corporate Luddite mindset of all mobile operators, really knew what to do with the G1. I think that they completely blew it. They should be inventing and promoting various ways of using it. It could have been a flagship product for Social Networking using T-Mobile's airtime. But instead they've let it languish and only the tech savvy really "get it".

Yet their general adverts are all about social interaction using their network, just not "how". Imagine that Liverpool Station gig being arranges and orchestrated by 400 people with G1s! Or very specific G1 ads that showed off it's use. Or a T-Mobile sponsored social networking app. The list could go on.

Instead they left it to O2 and the iPhone, such as the one I am using to send this from Turkey, to rule the roost.

Some firms deserve to fail. But T-Mobile, even in their own misguidance, are not one of these.

[miffed]

I sort of agree with the above , and do agree T-mobile don't deserve to die !

A few years back , I'd have said the opposite , crap coverage , mediocre value and crap handsets , no imagination .

Ironically T-mobile really did pull themselves together IMO - Personally I was getting excellent deals on handsets , excellent value , excellent CS , Excellent coverage , HSDPA well ahead of anyone else. Flext & both incanations of web & walk (even the original 40mb version ! ) were groundbreaking at the time , and my experience was that they DID have the network to back them up too (unlike others that deserve to die sooner IMO)


I can't help but wonder if they stretched themselves a little too far with the flext tarrifs ? Whatever, it is sad to see that T-mobile are struggling after doing such a great job at turning themselves around.

Always going to be a bad thing when an innovative competitor ceases to be innovative and competitve , as it sends the others into a state of complacency somewhat

Feel a bit guilty TBH , as I ended 2 of 3 T-mobile contracts (leaving only my daughters ) for the sole reason that I wanted iPhones , T-mobile did absolutely nothing wrong other than not hosting the iPhone ! I wonder how many others (former web&walkers ) made the same jump ?

[Ben]

Flext absolutely went wrong. The tariff was 'too attractive' and sucked in huge amounts of new customers, subsequently sucking out the entire -T-Mobile acquisition budget and leaving them lifeless for, what felt like, an infinite period. When the first Flext customers came to renew after 18 months -T-Mobile had very little to keep them with, resulting in high churn to other networks who were more than happy to poach the business.

If I remember correctly, -T-Mobile's main mistake in the launch of Flext was paying out too much subsidy. Everyone pushed it hard when, in reality, it was a tariff that could have built its own momentum.

It's hard to think what else they really did wrong, though. I've never been with them, so, somehow, their efforts have failed to appeal to me. In fact, -T-Mobile is the only network that I've never had a contract with. But then I've never lived in areas that have good coverage from them, going by the experience of friends, and that does make a difference to ones buying decision.

Handsets have always been a problem with T-Mobile. Every time I've looked the selection has been quite limited. At the mid-range they're usually fine, but at the high-end I've never found anything I've needed to go to them for. The G1 could have been a big coup for them, but perhaps they realised that the handset wasn't 100% ready to be pushed hard. Unfortunately Vodafone didn't realise this with the BlackBerry Storm...

It's sad that -T-Mobile is somehow worth less than the money it paid for its licence to operate 3G services in the UK. Given that, it's hard to believe they haven't been snapped up already. Save the global credit crises and DT would have probably been able to offload them by now. I don't think any UK networks are in a hurry to buy them given that, in its current position, -T-Mobile UK is a lame duck.

Just a note on SMS - while technically they cost 'nil', commercially the networks have to pay to terminate SMS messages on each others networks just like they do with calls. Interconnect is widely believed to be at around 3p, but probably doesn't work out to that much in reality. Competition in the UK appears to have kept the rate more favourable than elsewhere in Europe.