communications

Mercury Communications

Photograph by suburbanblokeon Flickr.

Calls could be made free to landlines in the area the mobile was situated in, and to adjacent landline exchange Mercury Communications codes. Mercury was the first competitor to BT, although it proved only moderately successful at challenging their dominance, it was communications to set the path for new communication companies to challenge Mercury Communications BT s dominance. Mercury began by offering fixed-line facilities direct to businesses, residential and small business.

The consumer arm of the latter would eventually find itself Communications in Uganda bought out by the telecommunications firm NTL in 1999, and then further sold on to NPower in 2001 before the service was withdrawn Mercury Communications entirely some years later. This was later replaced by a more modern indirect service which required only the dialling of the access code (by then 132 ) and the destination number.

This enabled the Smart Box to be connected to a large number of TR s customers, Mercury Communications so traffic was routed away from BT onto Mercury s network. Mercury pulled out of the PABX market in 1996, when it sold that part of the business to Siemens, creating Siemens Business Communication Systems (SBCS) From 1986 Mercury operated public payphones in the UK, in competition with BT. Mercury also provided Mercury Communications backbone services to the emerging groups of British cable operators which were beginning to offer their own fixed-line telephone services. In 1997 the Mercury brand ceased to be and it was amalgamated into Cable & Wireless Communications.

The company was formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Cable & Mercury Communications Wireless to challenge the monopoly of British Telecom (BT) which was privatised in 1984. These proved not to be profitable and this interest was sold in 1995.

Users could use the Mercury 2300 service via their existing BT phone line by dialling a 131 prefix followed by a ten-digit customer code, then the number which they wished to dial. The service was first rolled out in the London M25 area, and offered free mobile to landline calls at off-peak times, weekends and Bank Holidays.

. The majority of the media, however, have not taken to using this new name. Mercury moved into the Private Branch eXchange market in 1990 as a result of Telephone Rentals being bought by Cable & Wireless.

Its name lives on through its original sponsorship of the Mercury Music Prize, now dubbed the Barclaycard Mercury Prize in light of its most recent sponsors. Mercury Communications was a national telephone company in the United Kingdom.

They were notable for their varied designs which imitated architectural styles. Mercury also operated the first GSM 1800 mobile phone service, launched in 1993, as Mercury One2one.