02.05.2022

20 years of O₂:Changing the world of telecommunications

On its 20th birthday, O₂ looks back on an impressive success story. From the Homezone to the convergent tariff for all networks: Since its launch in May 2002, the brand has stood for freedom, self-determination, innovative strength and customer orientation. With this strategic orientation, O₂ has shaped the telecommunications market time and again and will continue to be a fair and high-price pioneer in the market in the future. For all its customers and those who want to become customers, O₂ is celebrating its birthday with attractive offers in all areas - mobile telephony, Internet@Home and hardware.

"We want to make people's digital everyday life a little better every day! Our core brand O₂ is at the heart of this. It is stronger than ever - and the growth engine for Telefónica Deutschland," congratulates Markus Haas, CEO of Telefónica Deutschland, and looks back. "In the past 20 years, an immense amount has happened in the telecommunication market for the consumer! We are 'always on' and O₂ Telefónica makes this possible. Smartphones, broadband fixed network, high-volume tariffs - these are no longer luxuries, but are part of our everyday life as a matter of course, also thanks to our high-performance price solutions."

"We are celebrating a brand that has never been as successful on the market as it is today: more and more people are choosing O₂. And our customers are more satisfied and loyal than ever before. Because we deliver the most attractive overall telecommunications package in the German market," explains Wolfgang Metze, Chief Private Customer Officer of O₂ Telefónica. "Of course, we are not resting on our success. We are continuing to work in a focused manner on benefit-oriented, innovative and fair products with a convincing price-performance ratio. At the same time, we are also continuing to improve our multi-award-winning sales and service. Together with our very good mobile network and the largest Internet@Home availability in Germany, we have created a strong starting position to continue to be successful with O₂ as an integrated full-service provider in the future!"

Revolution in the mobile phone market: from the O₂ Homezone to O₂ Free

In 2002, Viag Interkom becomes the O₂ brand. From the very beginning, O₂ shaped the mobile communications market and set a strong course towards freedom for its customers. With the O₂ Homezone, users can also be reached on the move and at no extra cost via their landline number, and with O₂ Genion, O₂ also abolishes the monthly basic fee in 2007. In the same year, O₂ DSL, O₂'s first fixed-network product, was launched. In 2009, the first O₂ tariff with a cost airbag is launched on the market: as soon as the limit for calls and text messages is used up, no further costs are incurred for the remaining month within Germany to all German networks (fixed network and mobile) with O₂ o. With O₂ My Handy, O₂ is the first provider to decouple the purchase of a mobile phone from the tariff: in contrast to the current market practice, O₂ customers do not simply continue to pay for their actually paid-off mobile phone after the end of the 24-month contract period. When the instalment plan period for the device ends, O₂ automatically only charges for the tariff and the customers celebrate their personal "Tag Nix".

On its 20th birthday, O₂ can look back on an impressive success story.

According to the VATM, mobile customers in Germany used an average of 30 percent more mobile data in 2012 than in the previous year. O₂ has the right tariff for this: O₂ Blue is the first data-centred tariff in the German mobile market - customers no longer pay for telephony and SMS, but only for mobile data. Four years later, O₂ Free finally unleashes the data usage of customers and makes endless surfing possible, as the most important applications can still be used at 1 MBit/s after the data volume has been used up. In 2020, this surfing guarantee becomes obsolete when O₂ Free introduces extra-large data packages as a new standard.

In 2018, O₂ customers will be able to surf the net for the first time without volume limits with O₂ Free Unlimited. And with O₂ my All in One, the first convergent tariff for unlimited data volume for mobile and fixed network was launched, which has been celebrating success since 2021 in a further developed form as O₂ One Unlimited: Users can configure their individual combined package of mobile and fixed network and the tariff thus adapts flexibly to the respective life situation. In 2019, O₂ TV powered by waipu.tv will be launched as one of the first innovative additional services for O₂ mobile and fixed network customers. On the Day of German Unity in 2020, O₂ will switch on the 5G network. At the end of the year, O₂ will be the first provider to launch a tariff for all network technologies with O₂ my Home. Through cooperations, O₂ is the only network provider to have access to DSL, cable and fibre optics as well as WLAN via its own mobile network. O₂ thus offers the largest Internet@Home availability in Germany. At the end of 2020, O₂ can greet its customers with "Welcome to the very good O₂ network". This is because the renowned trade magazine "connect" awarded the O₂ network a "very good" rating for the first time and confirmed this verdict one year later.¹ More than 2.4 billion gigabytes of data in total, i.e. around 5.5 million gigabytes per day, flowed through the O₂ network alone in 2021. This daily value is significantly higher than the total annual data volume in German mobile networks in 2007, which according to VATM was only 3.7 million gigabytes in total. With its large data packages at a convincing price-performance ratio, O₂ is successfully ensuring that customers in the O₂ network are integrating more and more digital services into their everyday lives. While O₂ Free customers already use 10 GB per month and SIM card in 2021, the average monthly data consumption in Germany, according to VATM, is 3.27 GigaByte.