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France Telecom Introduces Unik…

… making a branding faux pax as it were.

Unik is such a strange brand name for a home zone mobile telephony service for the UK. Orange is introducing an offering to compete against BT's offering which according to The Independent has gained 30,000 users. You might recall that BT has no mobile service, having sold off the wireless division to shareholders as mmO2 which has been since acquired by Telefonica of Spain.

So, the Orange service which I would guess is pronounced the same as the noun 'eunuch ' which is a castrated boy, which is not something that I would think the British sensibility would really accept all that well.

The home zone service uses UMA technology to offer a mobile service and price for out-of-WiFi-coverage GSM service and the same VoIP price level for calls made from the WiFi-coverage area. The consumer purchases a dual mode phone with a WiFi home adapter that supports signaling transversal to the Orange softswitch.

According to The Independent, both O2 and BT are disappointed with their home zone service takeup.