The name Virgin has come to be synonymous not just to entertainment, with its media and music recording business, not just to trip with its chain of hotels, car hires, and airlines, but to a host of products and services that carry the Virgin tag that contain something as mundane as a cola drinks, books, flowers all the way to being an electric power supplier.
It now has about 400 companies under the Virgin Group. Citizen in the movable phone communities know it as a 2G and 3G network operator in the Gsm and Cdma standards and is great known as Virgin movable under the Virgin Media corporate house which in turn is under the Virgin Group of super-tycoon Sir Richard Branson.
A Brief Look Into the Past
It was in 1999 when Virgin movable was launched from a secret joint speculation between One2One which was to come to be T-Mobile in 2002 and the conglomerate Virgin Group of Sir Richard Branson, whose enterprise empire included nearly 40 companies carrying the Virgin brand and included the paramount upscale airline Virgin Atlantic. The joint speculation called for leasing network bandwidth from local telecoms provider primarily from One2One and reselling it under the Virgin movable name.
After acquiring One2One and renaming it T-Mobile Uk, Deutsche Telekom sold its 50% equity in the joint speculation to the Virgin Group which now owned all of the company. But in 2005, the carrier entered into talks with Nlt-Telewest Inc, for an equity sway which would give Richard Branson a stake in the larger Nlt-Telewest company. And it was in 2006 that the deal went straight through with Nlt-Telewest rebranded as Virgin Media which made it the first four-way or quadruple lay media conglomerate on the planet.
It brings together under one roof original television broadcast media, fixed line phone services, broadband internet and movable phone services.
A Novel enterprise Model
Uk's first virtual movable network operator launched in 1999 is also the world's first. Unlike it competitors, Virgin movable does not own or operate its own network infrastructure. Rather, it has contracts with local network providers for reselling to consumers. It's essentially a subcontracting deal and is not a new enterprise model. But in the area of movable telephony, when carriers like Vodafone, Orange, T-mobile and O2 have invested on putting up their respective 2G and 3G networks for which they get subscription sales from consumers, the enterprise model is new.
In the Uk, Virgin movable uses the current 2G and 3G networks of T-Mobile. To a large extent, the enterprise model didn't have to be saddled with capital saving costs in putting up, operating and maintaining a capital-intensive telecoms network and can therefore be contentious in pricing 2G and 3G network services to subscribers with value added differentiating services.
This became the thorough enterprise model for Virgin movable companies that finally sprouted in other countries. In the Us, it has Sprint Nextel as its network providers. In France, it uses Orange S.A. In Canada, it uses Bell Mobility, South Africa uses Cell C and in India, it uses the Tata Indicom network.
In all the countries it operates, only prepaid pay-as-you-go services are the norm but it also offers post paid option to opt customers that want approval in the Us, Uk, South Africa, Canada and Australia.
A First For the Virgin Group
