Flextel is a British company that pioneered the use of

personal numbering Personal numbering is the name for the virtual telephone number service in the UK. Typically the national destination code used for this service is (0)70. The service provides a flexible virtual telephone number able to be routed to any other num ...

in telecommunications in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

Company history

In 1991

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

ran a trial which led in 1992 to the ''AT&T EasyReach 700'' service of

follow-me A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX). A business telephone syst ...

numbers, on

area code 700 Area code 700 of the North American Numbering Plan is a service access code (SAC) implemented by interexchange carriers. It is reserved for carrier-specific number assignments to special services or destinations. It was introduced in 1983 for prov ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

numbering plan A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, reac ...

. Stanford White – a former

executive – brought this to the attention of

Oftel The Office of Telecommunications (Oftel) (''the telecommunications regulator'') was a department in the United Kingdom government, under civil service control, charged with promoting competition and maintaining the interests of consumers in the UK ...

Lobbying Oftel

After the Duopoly Review White Paper in 1991 it was clear that there was now an opportunity for small niche players in the UK telecoms market. There followed a protracted period of lobbying of

by Stanford White (of Numbering Viewed Worldwide Ltd) along with William Goodall (of Goodall Personal Numbering Ltd, renamed Flextel Ltd in 1994). Finally, in mid-1993, each company was issued with a licence by the DTI (now

BERR The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) was a United Kingdom government department. The department was created on 28 June 2007 on the disbanding of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), and was itself disbanded ...

), under section 7 of the

Telecommunications Act 1984 The Telecommunications Act 1984 (c 12) is an Act of Parliament, Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The rules for the industry are now contained in the Communications Act 2003. Provisions The provisions of the act included the followi ...

, to provide telecommunications services. Together Stanford and William had effectively created the personal numbering market in the UK.

Company formation

In 1992 Flextel was formed by a team of management professionals, some of whom helped found and launch the

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public limited company, plc () is a British Multinational corporation, multinational Telephone company, telecommunications company. Its registered office and Headquarters, global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It ...

service. As a result of

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

roaming knowledge, Flextel was able to launch the UK's first commercial personal numbering service by December 1993, piggy-backed onto the

Mercury Mercury commonly refers to: * Mercury (planet), the nearest planet to the Sun * Mercury (element), a metallic chemical element with the symbol Hg * Mercury (mythology), a Roman god Mercury or The Mercury may also refer to: Companies * Merc ...

One2One T-Mobile UK was a mobile network operator in the UK. First launched as Mercury One2One (stylised one2one) on 7 January 1993, the network was originally operated by Mercury Communications. one2one was purchased by Deutsche Telekom in 1999, wh ...

network on the

0956 7xxxxx range. Flextel was the only player in this challenging pre-market phase.

The market appears

In 1995 the UK telecoms regulator,

(now

Ofcom The Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom. Ofcom has wide-ranging powers acros ...

), reserved the whole of the 070 range exclusively for personal numbering, ensuring adequate number availability for the future. This move was fully supported by Flextel and, in June 1995, Flextel migrated its existing customers from 0956 7xxxxx to 070 107x xxxx numbers, the first UK personal number service in the specially designated 070 range. This was quickly followed by intense competition from a number of new personal numbering providers.

Technological developments

In 2001 Flextel was first to launch the ability to reroute a personal number using

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

."Flextel launches ability to reroute a personal number using short message system text messaging"
Newsbytes News Network, 8 March 2001 In 2002 Flextel deployed its own

switches In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type of ...

and

real-time database A real-time database is a database system which uses real-time processing to handle workloads whose state is constantly changing. This differs from traditional databases containing persistent data, mostly unaffected by time. For example, a stock ma ...

s and gradually expanded its service proposition to non-geographic,

mobile Mobile may refer to: Places * Mobile, Alabama, a U.S. port city * Mobile County, Alabama * Mobile, Arizona, a small town near Phoenix, U.S. * Mobile, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Mobile ( ...

and

geographic Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and ...

flexible telephone numbers. After over 15 years, the market now has numerous

service provider A service provider (SP) is an organization that provides services, such as consulting, legal, real estate, communications, storage, and processing services, to other organizations. Although a service provider can be a sub-unit of the organization t ...

s of

virtual telephone number A virtual number, also known as direct inward dialing (DID) or access numbers, is a telephone number without a directly associated telephone line. Usually, these numbers are programmed to forward incoming calls to one of the pre-set telephone num ...

s, each with a different package of advanced features, e.g. conference calling, fax to email, voicemail to email, area routing, time of day routing.

External links

Flextel

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Flextel Telecommunications companies of the United Kingdom Telecommunications companies established in 1992 Sandbach Companies based in Cheshire 1992 establishments in England