Talk:Rabbit (telecommunications)

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Closure date of Rabbit?

The article indicates a closure date for the Rabbit network of December 1993 but I can definitely recall Rabbit phones being advertised in London (on radio station Capital Gold, with a campaign using an adaptation of the song My Old Man's A Dustman) in Autumn 1994 and "stylish" versions aimed at female purchasers on a poster campaign on the London Underground around the start of 1995, by which time it was already clear that new Vodafone subscribers alone per quarter outnumbered all Rabbit subscribers by 25 to 1. (I have no exact citation but I believe that London's Evening Standard ran an article to this effect in late 1994.)

Was the December 1993 closure for Manchester only?

Dajwilkinson 23:54, 24 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

More than one base station per subscriber!

Interesting that "At the height of Rabbit's operations they had twelve thousand base stations and ten thousand customers in the UK." So they had more than one base station for each subscriber. No wonder the service failed. 86.132.51.199 (talk) 19:48, 12 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Free Orange handsets

Someone that worked at Orange told me that the Rabbit customers where given free Orange handsets when Rabbit closed, as compensation. At the time, Orange Nokia cost £199, so it was a pretty good deal. I have no reference, so it goes here. Having said that, Orange didn't cover all the UK at the time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.25.19 (talk) 01:32, 18 October 2009 (UTC) Yep that is true. I was one of the few Rabbit subscribers (a loyalty to my employer as I was in the design team for the CT2 base stations). So I found myself as an Orange customer on they day they launched their PCN service. Many people in the industry at that time wondered what on earth Hutchison were thinking of, but in fact the Telepoint license was a pre-requisite for them to be awarded the PCN license that became Orange. The money lost on Rabbit was a small price to pay for the ticket to become one of Europe's largest cellular telecom companies! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.80.227.15 (talk) 12:14, 16 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite as I remember..

I think the home base stations counted towards the 12,000 base station installation so most of them would have been in Manchester homes and only useful if you were walking past. A bit like being able to use using someone's Virgin router guest account from outside their home and counting this as widespread WiFi coverage. The article mentions 10,000 customers and closed with 2,000 subscribers. I doubt they lost 8,000 customers before they closed and think this is an error. Imagine users giving up their mobiles today en mass. Also, there is no mention of Sir Clive Sinclair who stated publicly that his next big product was a Rabbit Phone and had prototypes to demonstrate. I think they were to cost 10p per call which was the same as payphones. Until recently Watford Junction train station had Rabbit signs in one or more waiting room. I guess only I knew what the signs referred to. 82.20.10.113 (talk) 16:41, 13 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]