Rabbit was a British location-specific ( Telepoint)

telephone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into e ...

service backed by Hutchison, which later created the

Orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower *Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum * ...

GSM mobile network, followed by 3. The Rabbit network was the best-known of four such services introduced in the 1980s, the others being BT Phonepoint, Mercury Callpoint and Zonephone. Although Hutchison received a licence for Rabbit in 1989, the service was not launched until May 1992. Telepoint services such as Rabbit allowed subscribers to carry specially designed (

CT2 CT2 is a cordless telephony standard that was used in the early 1990s to provide short-range proto-mobile phone service in some countries in Europe. It is considered the precursor to the more successful DECT system. CT2 was also referred to by its ...

) home phone handsets with them and make outgoing calls whenever they were within of a Rabbit transmitter.

Rollout

The initial network only supported outgoing calls, but offered paging and messaging facilities as standard on all customer accounts. The service was rolled out after extensive tests with 1,000 users and 2,000 base stations located across the UK. Original plans were for 12,000 base stations to be placed around the UK by December 1992. The service was launched in

Greater Manchester Greater Manchester is a metropolitan county and combined authority, combined authority area in North West England, with a population of 2.8 million; comprising ten metropolitan boroughs: City of Manchester, Manchester, City of Salford, Salford ...

in May 1992 with the entire city centre of Manchester covered with Rabbit base stations. The service was then rolled out to the rest of the North of England and there was nationwide coverage by the autumn of 1993. At the height of Rabbit's operations, there were 12,000 base stations and 10,000 customers in the UK.

Closure

The service ceased in December 1993, only 20 months after being launched. Rabbit had 2,000 subscribers at the time the service closed. The failure of Rabbit can be mainly attributed to the fall in cost of analogue mobile phones from

Cellnet O₂ UK (legally incorporated as Telefonica UK Limited, stylized as O₂) is a British telecommunications services provider, headquartered in Slough, England. It operates under the O2 brand. It is owned by Virgin Media O2, a 50:50 joint ventu ...

and

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 ...

, which also accepted incoming calls. The imminent conversion of these mobile phone networks to the digital

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 as ...

standard sealed Rabbit's fate.

Hutchison Whampoa Hutchison Whampoa Limited (HWL) was an investment holding company based in Hong Kong. It was a Fortune Global 500 company and one of the largest companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. HWL was an international corporation with a dive ...

lost around $183m from the failure of Rabbit but later went on to found the

and 3 mobile phone networks. Wall-mounted signs advertising the Rabbit base stations were still visible in various parts of the UK some 20 years after the Rabbit service ended.

Home use

Many of the Rabbit CT2 telephones were sold with a home base station as a home CT2 cordless telephone system and these continued to be used for many years after the closure of the Rabbit network.

Branding

The Rabbit name, logo and advertising campaign idea was devised by Hook Advertising and specifically its chairman Chris Joseph. Competitors emerging onto the new Telepoint market tended to adopt more technological-sounding names — ''Zonephone'', ''Callpoint'' and ''Phonepoint'' — and Joseph wanted to devise a distinctive brand name to stand out in the market. He selected the name ''Rabbit'' as it sounded warmer and more friendly. Joseph had studied

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

and sketched out a logo based an inverted ' Я' character from the

Cyrillic alphabet , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

with a dot in the middle, which resembled both the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

'R' and the head of a rabbit. Hook successfully pitched the idea to the

Barclays Barclays () is a British multinational universal bank, headquartered in London, England. Barclays operates as two divisions, Barclays UK and Barclays International, supported by a service company, Barclays Execution Services. Barclays traces ...

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

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consortium (BYPS) and signed with them in 1989.

Legal dispute

When BYPS sold the telepoint network business to Hutchison in late 1990, Hook Advertising refused to sign over the copyright of the Rabbit logo. Hutchison had terminated the contracts of other BYPS suppliers and Hook Advertising believed both that they were about to have their own contract terminated too and that signing over the copyright was not part of their contract. Hutchison terminated the contract in September 1991 and sued Hook Advertising in the High Court for an assignment of the copyright. Hook Advertising replied by suing

, Philips, Shell and Hutchinson for various breaches and severances of contract. Barclays in turn sued Hook Advertising. Litigation continued for four years.

References

Citations Sources *

External links

{{commonscat
Article with photos of a Rabbit handset and base station

Report on digital cordless networks from 1992 (Dr. Walter H. W. Tuttlebee)

The Rabbit setup kit - Science & Society Picture Library
Advertising and marketing controversies Mobile phone companies of the United Kingdom Orange S.A. 1992 establishments in the United Kingdom 1993 disestablishments in the United Kingdom