History
Germany's initial mobile-communications services were radiotelephone systems that were owned and operated by the state postal monopoly, Deutsche Bundespost. It launched the analog first-generation C-Netz ("C Network", marketed as C-Tel), Germany's first true mobile phone network in 1985.
On July 1, 1989, West Germany reorganized Deutsche Bundespost and consolidated telecommunications into a new unit, Deutsche Bundespost Telekom. On July 1, 1992, it began to operate Germany's first GSM network, along with the C-Netz, as its DeTeMobil subsidiary. The GSM 900 MHz frequency band was referred to as the "D-Netz", and Telekom named its service D1; the private consortium awarded the second license (now Vodafone Germany) chose the equally imaginative name D2.
Deutsche Bundespost Telekom was renamed Deutsche Telekom in 1995, and began to be privatized in 1996. That same year, DT began to brand its subsidiaries with the T- prefix, renaming the DeTeMobil subsidiary T-Mobil.
In 2002, as DT consolidated its international operations, it anglicized the T-Mobil name to T-Mobile.
On April 1, 2010, the T-Home and T-Mobile German operations merged to form a new wholly owned DT subsidiary, Telekom Deutschland GmbH. The T-Mobile brand was discontinued in Germany and replaced with the Telekom brand. The T-Mobile brand is still used in markets outside Germany. Non-German mobile-network assets are organized into various country-specific subsidiaries under the T-Mobile International AG subsidiary of DT.
In 2010, T-Mobile UK became part of a joint venture with France Telecom's UK mobile-network provider, Orange UK. Combined, the two companies make the UK's largest mobile-network operator, called Everything Everywhere. Despite the joint venture, the T-Mobile and Orange brands continue to co-exist in the UK market.
The T-Mobile brand is present in ten European countries – Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom – as well as the United States, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
Globally, T-Mobile International subsidiaries have a combined total of approximately 150 million subscribers, making T-Mobile International the world's tenth-largest mobile-phone service provider by subscribers and the third-largest multinational after the UK's Vodafone and Spain's Telefónica.
Read more about this topic: T-Mobile
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)