page_title: Rabbit (telecommunications)
section_title: Closure
hierarchical_section_title: Rabbit (telecommunications) / Closure
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture Taken by myself on Penny Meadow, Ashton Under Lyne.
context_page_description: Rabbit was a British location-specific telephone service backed by Hutchison, which later created the Orange GSM mobile network, followed by 3. The Rabbit network was the best-known of four such services introduced in the 1980s, the others being Phonepoint, Mercury Callpoint and Zonephone. Although Hutchison had been issued a licence for Rabbit in 1989, the service was not launched until May 1992. Telepoint services such as Rabbit allowed subscribers to carry specially designed home phone handsets with them and make outgoing calls whenever they were within 100 metres of a Rabbit transmitter.
context_section_description: The service ceased in December 1993, only 20 months after being launched. Rabbit had 2,000 subscribers at the time the service closed. The failure of Rabbit can be mainly attributed to the fall in cost of analogue mobile phones from Cellnet and Vodafone, which also accepted incoming calls. The imminent conversion of these mobile phone networks to the digital GSM standard sealed Rabbit's fate. Hutchison Whampoa lost around $183m from the failure of Rabbit but later went on to found the Orange and 3 mobile phone networks.
  Wall-mounted signs advertising the Rabbit base stations were still visible in various parts of the UK some 20 years after the Rabbit service ended.
caption: Rabbit base station sign, Penny Meadow, Ashton-Under-Lyne, Greater Manchester
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