Rabbit (telecommunications)

Rabbit was a British location-specific (Telepoint) telephone 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 Phonepoint, Mercury Callpoint and Zonephone. Although Hutchison had been issued 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 100 metres of a Rabbit transmitter.

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 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.

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 and Vodafone, which also accepted incoming calls. The imminent conversion of these mobile phone networks to the modern-day GSM standard sealed Rabbit's fate. Hutchison Whampoa lost around $183m from the failure of Rabbit but later went on to found the Orange and 3 mobile phone networks.

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