E-Plus (operator)

E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co. KG

Type	GmbH & Co. KG
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	1992
Headquarters	Düsseldorf, Germany
Area served	Germany
Key people	Thorsten Dirks (CEO)
Products	mobile internet, mobile telephony
Owner	Telefonica (100%)
Number of employees	>4,000 (end 2013)
Website	www.eplus-gruppe.de

E-Plus was a mobile telecommunications operator in Germany. With more than 25 million subscribers, E-Plus was the third largest mobile operator in Germany, until the takeover from Telefónica Germany in October, 2014.

E-Plus was owned by Dutch telecommunications operator KPN since 2002. In July 2013, Telefónica Germany announced a planned takeover. The deal was approved by KPN shareholders in October 2013. The merger was delayed because of concerns by the European Commission on reduced competition in the German mobile market. In July 2014, the European Commission approved the merger, conditional on E-Plus giving up some frequencies and network capacity.

The company was awarded Germany's first DCS-1800 (later renamed GSM-1800, also known as E-Netz (; lit. E-Network) in Germany) license in 1993. One term of the licence was that no further Mobile network operator could be started within 3 years of the start of the network.

The network started operation as a "metropolitan" network, with coverage only in the biggest cities, in 1994. The coverage area was expanded rapidly, but for years the network's image was hampered by the view that its coverage was lacking. As a countermeasure, voicemail retrieval was free of charge for the first of years of operation, and calls were billed in six-second increments (in contrast to the one-minute increments of the other networks); after text messaging was introduced, it too was free for some time.

E-Plus was the second network in Germany to offer prepaid tariffs to its customers (after T-Mobile's XtraCard) and later introduced HSCSD, which boosts data rates on GSM networks to analogue modem speed levels. Shortly after that, E-Plus upgraded its network to support GPRS. They now also operate a 3G UMTS network.