Rabbit was a British location-specific ( Telepoint)

telephone A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables 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 ...

service backed by Hutchison, which later created the Orange 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) 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 ceremonial county in North West England. It borders Lancashire to the north, Derbyshire and West Yorkshire to the east, Cheshire to the south, and Merseyside to the west. Its largest settlement is the city of Manchester. ...

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 Telefonica UK Limited, trading as O2 UK (stylised as O2), is a British telecommunications services provider. It is the largest mobile network in the United Kingdom, with approximately 23.2million subscribers . The network was launched in 198 ...

and

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, 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 family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...

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 $183 million from the failure of Rabbit but later went on to found the Orange and 3 mobile phone networks. Wall-mounted signs advertising the Rabbit base stations were still visible in various parts of the UK some 30 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) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

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

Cyrillic alphabet The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...

with a dot in the middle, which resembled both the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

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

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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