Orange and T-Mobile become Everything Everywhere

The company arising out of T-Mobile and Orange's UK merger has been named Everything Everywhere.

The joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom announced its name in a statement on Tuesday, along with a plan to launch a "new assault" on the UK business market. Orange and T-Mobile will retain their distinct brands, with their own shops, campaigns, pricing and service centres.

"Together, we are Britain's biggest communications company, with over 30 million customers," Everything Everywhere chief executive Tom Alexander — formerly the chief of Orange UK — said in the statement. The erstwhile chief executive of T-Mobile UK, Richard Moat, is Everything Everywhere's deputy chief executive and chief financial officer.

The company plans to be a "single super-network that will give bigger and better coverage for customers, with a smaller impact on the environment", it said in its statement. Customers will be able to roam across both network at no additional cost from "later this year", it added.

The Orange and T-Mobile brands have 713 high street stores between them. Orange is the larger brand of the two, with 17.3 million customers to T-Mobile's 13 million. Orange also brings with it 863,000 fixed-line broadband customers.

Everything Everywhere will try to develop new revenue streams from mobile advertising and mobile commerce, the company said. No details were given of its planned business market push, but spokesman Stuart Jackson said the details will come later this year.

Telecoms analyst Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis said that a business market push could be tricky for Everything Everywhere as Vodafone and O2, the oldest operators in the UK, "have traditionally had a stronger profile in the corporate space". He noted, however, that Everything Everywhere had "scale on their side" and some limited fixed-line assets through Orange's network.

"I generally am extremely sceptical about the idea of mobile commerce," Bubley added. "I don't see mobile payments in the UK as being anything other than a sideshow for many years. Mobile advertising is interesting [but] the signs I get are that the majority of large advertisers want to be able to advertise across all networks, so to some extent [Everything Everywhere is] held hostage to fortune with regards to what they can negotiate with other operators."

The new company, which brings together 16,500 employees, will be officially integrated on 1 July. The merger was announced in September 2009 and gained approval from the European Commission in March this year. In order to gain that approval, the joint venture had to give up a chunk of its spectrum to allay anti-competition fears.