Rabbit

Rabbit was a British location-specific (Telepoint) 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 BT Phonepoint, Mercury Callpoint and Zonephone. Although Hutchison received 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 (CT2) home phone handsets with them and make outgoing calls whenever they were within of a Rabbit transmitter. Rollout The initial network only supported outgoing calls, but offered paging and messaging facilities as standard on all customer accounts. The service was rolled out after extensive tests with 1,000 users and 2,000 base stations located across the UK. Original plans were for 12,000 base stations to be placed around the UK by December 1992. The service was launched in Greater Manchester in May 1992 with the entire city centre of Manchester covered with Rabbit base stations. The service was then rolled out to the rest of the North of England and there was nationwide coverage by the autumn of 1993. At the height of Rabbit's operations, there were 12,000 base stations and 10,000 customers in the UK. Closure