Mercury Communications

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Mercury Communications was a national telephone company in the United Kingdom. The company was formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless to challenge the monopoly of British Telecom (BT) which was privatised in 1984. Mercury proved only moderately successful at challenging BT's dominance.

In 1997 the Mercury brand ceased to be and it was amalgamated into Cable & Wireless Communications. The consumer arm of the latter would eventually find itself bought out by the telecommunications firm NTL, now Virgin Media. Its name lives on through its original sponsorship of the Mercury Music Prize, now dubbed the 'Nationwide Mercury Prize' in light of its most recent sponsors. The majority of the media, however, have not taken to using this new name.

[edit] Activities

Mercury moved into the Private Branch eXchange market in 1990 as a result of Telephone Rentals being bought by Cable & Wireless. This enabled the Smart Box to be connected to a large number of TR's customers, 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. These proved not to be profitable and this interest was sold in 1995.^[1]

Mercury also operated the first GSM 1800 mobile phone service, launched in 1993, as Mercury One2one. 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. Calls could be made free to landlines in the area the mobile was situated in, and to adjacent landline exchange codes ^[2] . Even after this plan ceased being sold, SIM cards that were subscribed to the plan continued to provide these free calls, and often changed hands for large sums of money^{[citation needed]}. Coverage was extended throughout the decade, with most of the UK having service by 1997.