Staff Reporter

An attempt to force T-Mobile to accept trade unions in its network function staff failed last week when a workers ballot was defeated by 181 votes.

Leslie Manasseh deputy general secretary of communications union Connect said:

T-Mobile and its consultants have an outdated and ill-informed image of what trade unions are about. Connect members across the communications industry know the difference that working together can make.

Weve had a great deal of support throughout this campaign. It doesnt stop here. Employees in T-Mobile deserve a say in their workplace. They have the right to be consulted about restructuring.

We urge employees in T-Mobile to exercise their legal right to join Connect. Workers have told us they want to make a difference. Were still here to provide the means for them to do that.

T-Mobile employed American labour specialists TBG Consulting to persuade employees to vote no in the ballot.

The ballot had been organised by Connect and the Communication Workers Union (CWU) following a recent growth in individual union membership.

The unions had been looking to give T-Mobile workers a greater say in company restructuring and how it would affect workers lives and working hours.

The two unions sought an application for statutory recognition to the Central Arbitration Committee but withdrew the application after discussion with T-Mobile. A less confrontational voluntary ballot was agreed upon.

TBG used focus groups and interviews with employees during which the companys preferences were made clear.

However Connect alleged that T-Mobile misrepresented the unions in order to persuade workers to vote against the ballot.

To win over 40 per cent of staff would have had to vote with a majority in favour of union representation. Around 570 people voted but the ballot failed by 181 votes.

The e-mail claims to be word-of-mouth advertising and goes under the subject line Nokia Is Giving Away Phones For FREE.

It offers a free Nokia 6210 to those who forward the e-mail to eight people.

A free Nokia WAP handset is supposedly on offer for those who forward it to 20 or more people provided they send a copy to an Anna Swelan at a Nokia e-mail address. Nokia said it does not employ anyone by the name of Anna Swelan.

Nokia head of corporate communications Mark Squire said the hoax e-mail dates back to early 1999 and had nothing to do with the company.

Nokia is aware of a hoax e-mail stating that Nokia is handing out free phones to people who forward the e-mail. This chain e-mail does not originate from Nokia he stressed.

It is not customary for Nokia to use this type of direct e-mailing to promote our products or services. We have started to investigate the origins of the e-mail. However as is generally the case with chain letters and e-mails they are virtually impossible to trace and are very difficult to stop.

Despite the age of the handsets on offer the message is still catching people out.

The company said it could not prevent its name from being used in general e-mail messages. But it strongly discouraged anyone from forging the Nokia brand and said it would take action against anyone found doing so.

Exec Connect will be available from the end of 2003 in multiple versions based on Java Symbian or XHTML technologies depending on the users device. The service identifies and selects the fastest connection rate available to users.

Gerhard Romen head of sales and marketing for the Nokia One Mobile Connectivity Service said: The value of mobile technologies for enterprises is very clear.

Easy-to-use mobile technology can play a significant role in providing competitive advantage for organisations by enabling executives to gain secure access to e-mail and other resources and to efficiently interact with employees.

The schoolboy 11-year-old Danny Gossage from Birmingham bought four handsets and a Nokia headset in two visits to a branch of Carphone Warehouse in Birmingham. It turned out that the boy had apparently taken 800 from a biscuit tin at his home in Great Barr Birmingham to buy the phones.

Three of the phones were later returned and a refund of 500 given to the parents. The fourth handset had been stolen from the boy.

The boys parents reckon that Carphone Warehouse staff should not have taken that amount of cash from a schoolboy.

A Carphone Warehouse spokesperson said: We have no plans to alter our sales policy as a result of the incident. We treat everyone as a customer regardless of age. We have no policy to prevent sales of phones to children.

The spokesperson added: We were concerned by the fact that the boy had such a large amount of cash to spend and staff contacted police to notify them. In any case we refunded the parents for the returned phones.

Among the 50 staff who will leave the company at the end of the month is Ternhill Communications founder Matt Sandford.

He joined Project Telecom when he sold Ternhill to Project for 500000 eight months ago and was appointed as regional sales director.

His appointment had been announced with glowing tributes from Project Telecom chief executive Tim Radford. Sandford said he was disappointed that things hadnt worked out and now regrets selling his company.

Its disappointing to be leaving so quickly. I had anticipated being here for at least another five to 10 years. If I could have foreseen this happening I would never have sold. There has been some restructuring and the two regions for the Midlands have been consolidated. Despite achieving the highest number of connections in Q1 the company took the decision to make me redundant. A lot of other good people have also lost their jobs.

Radford was unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.

The service has been on soft launch since April. The top-ups will be soon be available at all Moneybox and Co-operative Bank ATMs.

Vodafone and O2 users can access the service now. Orange Virgin and T-Mobile subscribers will be able to use the service shortly.

Electronic top-ups now account for nearly 40 per cent of the market.

Snook last week told a national newspaper the hard-nosed businessman adverts were absolutely the worst things I have ever seen.

Snook described the advert created by ad agency Mother as very irritating.

They are about as far away as you can get from the Orange ethos and values as I could possibly imagine he added.

But Orange business solutions marketing director Cynthia Gordon said the campaign had been imm-ensely successful in raising awareness of Orange as a business brand.

In terms of instant recall it has cut through five times stronger than any of our ads in the past three years.

Snook who is currently non-executive chairman at The Carphone Warehouse is credited by many journalists with inventing Oranges slogan the futures bright the futures Orange.

In fact the phase was conceived by Oranges ad agency in 1994 – Wight Collins Rutherford Scott.

Hans Snook was the founder and CEO of Orange from the beginning until February 2001 when he stepped back to become special adviser to the chairman of France Telecom said Gordon.

But an advertising style that was appropriate eight years ago is not appropriate in the existing market.

O2 says it has sold 23000 BlackBerrys to corporate users in the UK Germany Ireland and the Netherlands. But individual users were precluded as in-house e-mail servers were required.

The new BlackBerry allows personal and small business customers to use the device without a special e-mail server. Instead the customer configures the BlackBerry to retrieve e-mail from their ISP via O2s servers.

Around 250 customers will trial the new BlackBerry for two months before it is offered commercially. No prices have been determined for the new product. The existing BlackBerry costs just 50.

In addition O2 has also repriced its GPRS PC modem card in response to Vodafones Connect card. The new O2 card will cost 99. It can be inserted into laptop computers for Internet access and mobile e-mail over O2s GPRS network.

Customers will be offered a GPRS starter pack which will include 50Mb of data free. After that they will be offered O2s Data 5 package which offers 5Mb of data for 2. Additional megabytes are charged at 1.20 each.

This follows Virgin Mobile calling off its advertising boycott of The Times after settling its dispute with News International

The new television advertisement sees a boy called Damien running the Virgin Mobile Red Academy. The academy teaches people that phones can be used to call friends. The adverts satirise the Orange Learn campaign in which another young boy this time called Dylan teaches sales staff how to best help customers.

Virgin Mobile had clashed with The Times two weeks ago following the papers refusal to run a Virgin Mobile advertisement highlighting the small print in Oranges 1p text offer (Mobile News August 11).

Virgin had wanted to run its advertisement the day after Orange had taken every advertising page in The Times to herald the launch of its Fair initiative – a move that was estimated to have cost 250000.

There have been high-level meetings between Virgin Mobile and The Times and it has assured us that The Times did not refuse the advertisement for commercial reasons said a Virgin Mobile spokesperson.

The Times said it had refused to run the Virgin ad because Virgin had delivered it too late. Virgin rejected this justification claiming that the paper had refused to run it because it didnt want to upset Orange.

A Legends Penalty Shootout will give visitors a chance to take penalty shots against celebrity goalkeepers including former Everton star Neville Southall MBE former Liverpool keeper Bruce Grobbelaar England keeper David James and ex-Wimbledon keeper Hans Segers.

Pictures of the winning shots taken with camera phones are e-mailed to the kickers PC.

The push on camera phones continues with a celebrity photo-booth where punters can have their photo taken with pin-up models or one of the football stars attending the show. Other attractions include an F1 simulator using a Grand Prix circuit.

Mobile News readers can qualify for two tickets for the price of one by visiting www.mobilelifeevent.co.uk