Techno turkey - Rabbit phones

Published on Saturday 9 October 2004 00:27

In common with so many failures, it wasn’t so much that the technology was bad, but the timing was completely off. Even now, a decade after the network was switched off, the idea of a digital cordless phone that could be used at home, in the office or within 100m of a public access point

doesn’t seem completely daft.

At the end of the 1980s, Hutchison was one of four companies awarded UK licences to use this technology, called "CT2". The others - Phonepoint, Mercury Callpoint and Zonephone - had rather more limited trials, but Hutchison spent around four years and 200 million before calling it a day in 1994.

The Hutchison marketing department had obviously had fun, though, coming up with two word plays in one. Rabbit is slang for talk, but put next to the company’s name - Hutchison - you have another little joke.

The main problem was that you couldn’t call somebody in the street on a Rabbit phone, they could only call you. Hutchison tried to overcome this by using pagers, suggesting that you send a message to the person you wanted to speak to asking them to call you. It was cheaper, and easier, to use a phonebox.

At the same time, the mass market for mobile phones was just starting to take off. That was the unbeatable challenge.

Of course Hutchison didn’t disappear, although its marketing department failed to reach the same punning heights when naming the company’s mobile phone service - they called it, inexplicably, Orange - or with the desperately uninspired name for its third generation phone service, Three.