Going Underground

I had a Mercury phone account on my BT landline. I had to dial 132 in front of the number I think to route the call over their network. The phones with a blue Mercury button simply dialled 132 when pressed

I also had a one2one mobile phone, or as the network was dubbed by many, one2no one

It was financial suicide for new players. When they came to my town they rolled out quite literally a giant reel of cable and dug up all footpaths on the gamble that the take up would better the cost - madness.

Yes. They used the pipework from the London Hydraulic Power Company for cables. The company also had the added bonus that it had the rights to dig up the street in central London.

I still had a One2One SIM in my phone until a few years ago. I think it was only when I changed to a 4G contract that they sent me a new one.

The early contracts had free evening (and weekend?) calls and the network got busy after 6 as people would ring numbers and have long conversations and there were some who realised they could be used as very good quality baby monitors for the evening.

I believe those contracts ere very sought after and many didn't change contracts or upgrade so they kept them well into the T-Mobile era. Not as unique an offer these days though

Incidentally I always wanted one of those Rabbit signs for my bedroom.

There's still some around London, particularly in odd corners and kiosks in tube stations


Rabbit wasn't Mercury though, it was owned by Hutchinson who later launched Orange and then 3. Mercury had their own similar system called 'Callpoint'

I was always surprised that The Bill got away with using Mercury branded phone handsets at the station, but I guess the argument was that it was required for realism.

ITV soaps had, until a few years ago, various branded goods on them which were donated free by the companies concerned. That didn’t count as product placement as the companies didn’t actually pay to have their products on display.

Now, only companies which do pay PP fees have their products shown, other products are just genetic non-branded.

I'm sure it's still possible for branded products to be shown unpaid for as before? But presumably doing so would annoy the companies who do pay.

I’m certain Brookside had a Mercury Phone Box before installing a BT one. They had one on the close and the other on the parade.

Yes, and my phone, a Nokia brick, had a full size ( by full I mean credit card sized) SIM. Which is why even today some new SIMs are still delivered mounted in a credit card template.

Roaming agreements took a while, I rembemer May 1997 going to Montreux. One2One boasted you could could roam in Switzerland. Great I thought. Landed at Geneva and sure enough there was a network, called ‘City Tel’, that was a clue to take note of ! As I reached the suburbs of Geneva the signal vanished and that was that. Nothing beyond the city. When I reached Montreux I borrowed a colleague’s Cellnet phone that was firmly connected to SFR CH and phoned One2One customer services who admitted ‘roaming in Switzerland’ in reality meant ‘Geneva’.

Happy Days

I hope the regulator punished them for that - it's false advertising.


Which is itself part of BT, which is actually a bit weird because BT used to own Cellnet, which is now the Telefonica-owned O2.