View from City Road: Mobile phone boom is back

Sparkling subscription figures from Vodafone and Cellnet show that the boom in mobile telephones has resumed with a vengeance, particularly as new business customers rather than personal users made up half of Vodafone's March total.

Ironically Cellnet and Vodafone also benefited from the much publicised launch of rival Mercury One-2-One last September.

One-2-One, having caught the public's attention with free off-peak local calls, then stumbled at the starting block because of a shortage of telephones, now resolved.

While Cellnet and Vodafone boast loud and long about more than one million subscribers each, One-2-One remains secretive. The word in the industry is that it has about 70,000 customers but that three-quarters of the time spent on the network is on free calls.