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A couple of weekend newspaper reports have stated that the Fern Trading (Octopus Group) backed Y Corporation appears to still be gearing up to launch a new UK mobile operator of their own, which would be backed by a virtual operator (MVNO) agreement with Three UK. But readers of ISPreview will know that they already tried this last year (here) – leaving many early adopters confused.
According to the FT (paywall), which itself followed a report in the Sunday Telegraph, Fern has approached Three UK (soon to be merged with Vodafone) to explore the plans, with Y Corp already having an existing wholesale arrangement with the network operator as part of its branded MVNO offerings to businesses.
However, both articles seemed to be unaware of the fact that Y Corp already attempted this with a confusing “beta” launch at the end of 2024, which wasn’t initially promoted as a trial to early adopters. The new Ymobile service first went live in November 2024 by claiming to be the UK’s “first data-led, eSIM MVNO” (here), all while claiming to offer users a “simpler, more streamlined and environmentally friendly” alternative to traditional operators.
The plans they offered reflected a simplified range of 30-day 4G and 5G capable data-only (mobile broadband) eSIM plans (e.g. £5 for 10GB and up to 100GB for £15). But a month later (Dec 2024) the Y Mobile website suddenly vanished, while early adopters were informed that the service was in a “beta phase” (not something they mentioned in the original press shot) and the operator had “decided to temporarily pause Ymobile’s service“. Customer plans were then “terminated” in January 2025 (here).
A spokesperson for Ymobile told ISPreview in Dec 2024:
“As part of our ongoing commitment to delivering an outstanding mobile experience, we have decided to temporarily pause Ymobile’s service while we prepare for the next stage of its development.
This decision follows the completion of our beta phase, and we now begin our process of developing a more robust and advanced version of Ymobile for launch in the near future.
All of our current users’ contract agreements have been fulfilled, and the service is now in the process of being paused.
We appreciate all our users’ trust and understanding as we take this step, which will enable us to offer them an even better service moving forward. We will keep all our users updated on our progress, and we look forward to starting this new chapter in our journey soon.”
Suffice to say that this was no way to launch a new retail service into the market and will have done the company some damage, although they also clearly indicated their intention to prepare a “more robust and advanced version of Ymobile for launch in the near future“. But to be fair, they did issue refunds and gave the right amount of notice.
According to the latest newspaper reports, Octopus appointed Adam Dunlop, the former TalkTalk Consumer Chief, as a Director in January to explore the plans (the same month they terminated the old service) and still appear to be preparing to go live with a new service in the near future. But they’ll need to do something special to make up for the messy first attempt, which isn’t easy in today’s already quite diverse mobile market.