E-Plus

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For other uses, see E-Plus (disambiguation).

E-Plus is a mobile telecommunications operator in Germany. With 12.7 million subscribers as of 2007, E-Plus is the third largest mobile operator in Germany, after T-Mobile (30.7 million subscribers) and Vodafone (30.4 million subscribers).

The company was awarded Germany's first DSC-1800 (later renamed GSM-1800) 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.

In February 2006, after the EGSM900-band, which was in military use before, had become available in late 2005, German regulation authority assigned two 2 x 5 MHz ranges to each, E-Plus and O2 Germany, who previously both operated in GSM1800 only. In return to this step, which facilitates coverage in rural areas and provides additional capacity for urban areas, E-Plus and O2 Germany had to assign some GSM1800 frequencies to the two bigger operators, T-Mobile and Vodafone. The first GSM1800-base stations (cell sites) began running only in April 2006.