Administrator KPMG confirmed that there had been a great deal of interest in potential purchasers for the shops including one approach from a foreign player in the mobile comms industry.

KPMG joint administrative receiver John Dare told Mobile News there had been about 60 responses to an advertisement in the financial press offering the Talk! shops for sale.

Dare said it was expected a deal would be tied up before Christmas. But he said it was highly unlikely that any unsecured creditors would get their money back.

TCL was set up in 1984. Despite a turnover of 21 million in the year to June the company ran into trading difficulties and lost its battle with its bank to continue its lending.

As well as providing handsets MArtin Dawes will be setting up a private wire system that will allow mobiles to be accessed as internal extension phones with a four digit internal number.

The service billed through Cellcom allows people to run a mobile phone without having to sign a contract or buy pre-pay vouchers.

After an initial charge of 39.99 for the Mitsubishi Trium phone the package costs 6 a month inclusive of calls. After this calls cost 25p a minute peak rate and 12.5p off peak up to a limit of 16.

Credit is topped up by calling a Carphone Warehouse phone line or visiting a Carphone Warehouse store. A text message warns users when they have 2 left to go on their 16 limit.

We think the gap between prepay and subscription is too big. But there are lots of people who still want the reliability of a subscription but dont want to pay 17.50 a month said Dunstone.

This was planned before Virgin Mobile came on the scene. Were buying the airtime wholesale from One 2 One and paying Cellcom as a facilities house to provide the billing. It is being promoted as a separate brand. There is no credit check. They buy the phone on their credit card. We charge 6 every month and give 6 of calls. There is 30 days notice to cancel. If they make calls over that we bill them by SMS not paper. You can go into any of our stores and print off a copy for itemised billing.

By Virgin coming into the market the market has changed to an extent. There are now other people being virtual networks so were adapting to that he said.

Theres certainly a big challenge here at Ora and Im looking forward to be part of it said McLuskie.

Ora has just won a big contract to supply BTCellnet with accessories.

Said a Virgin spokesperson:

Were ahead of forecast and ahead of expectations. Theres been a good mix across the range. Obviously the cheaper handsets have sold most but weve been selling handsets across the price range. The volume of internet sales has come as a surprise. We were doing 20 per cent of sales before Christmas via the web. We forecast between five per cent and 10 per cent in the post launch period moving towards 20 at the end of the first year. Our aim was to get 25 per cent of sales on the web by the end of our first year. Were nearly there already.

Orange led the way with a record 1.22 million Just Talk pre-pay customers in the last three months of 1999 with 856000 new users attracted to the network in December.

Vodafone posted a record quarterly increase of over 1.075 million net new customers with a million of these choosing the pre-paid Pay as You Talk service. More than 4.2 million customers now use PAYT.

One 2 One recorded a 106 per cent increase of 903000 net customer connections over the same period in 1998 and more than doubled its customer base to 4.157000 customers by the end of last year. One 2 One now has 54 per cent of its total base on pre-pay

BTCellnet reported one million new customers for Q4 up 343000 on the same period in 1998.

The network also says that its Genie internet service provision business has registered 400000 users with subscriber levels growing at more than 2000 a day.

Oranges customer base more than doubled last year to five million users. A total of 2.73 million net new customers were added in 1999 compared with 962000 in 1998.

During the last year 769000 net new customers joined Orange on contract tariffs. Oranges contract base is now 2.45 million (or half of the total base) an increase of 46 per cent over the year.

For 1999 as a whole Orange added 1.96 million net new pre-pay customers compared with 471000 in 1998. Its total pre-pay customer base is now 2.45 million. Overall churn fell three per cent to 15.8 per cent including a small reduction in contract churn to 20. per cent for the 12 months to 31 December 1999.

Pre-pay churn fell 4.1 per cent to 8.8 per cent largely as a result of the accelerating growth in this segment.

1999 has been a phenomenal year for Orange said Hans Snook Orange chief executive officer and group managing director.

One in 12 people in the UK are now Orange customers. We have achieved clear leadership in the contract market throughout the year and an astounding performance in the pre-pay market following the launch of our new Just Talk package said Snook.

BTCellnet however says it is absolute leader for post-pay customers with 3.93 million users.

One 2 One managing director Tim Samples stated:

We have seen unprecedented levels of growth this year more than doubling our customer base and breaking through the four million mark.

We have an overall 17 per cent market share and are working on new initiatives which will see One 2 One continue to drive a growing share of the market.

The fault is in the software of a small batch of a few hundred phones that were distributed before Christmas.

The problem prevented customers from being able to top-up or activate their phones. If they tried to activate the phone responded with an unable to connect message. However those that persisted found they could still make calls for free.

Around 500 customers called BTCellnets Customer Care team to report the phones as faulty. Most of the callers were unaware that they could still make calls for free.

We have identified the handsets affected and we are arranging replacements for these customers said BTCellnet spokesman Dave Massey.

It is a handset fault. Not a fault with the network link/network intelligence. The message appearing on the phone screen when they try to activate the phone was unable to connect. This prompted many of them to phone us before attempting to make calls.

This is the third time BTCellnet has suffered from pre-pay hardware glitches. The first Philips Digas and later Siemens C12 phones could be retro-fitted with illegal chips that reset the credit counter to zero when the phone was turned off and back on.

BTCellnet is the only network afflicted by these problems as much of the pre-pay billing intelligence is in the handsets. On the other networks all the billing is controlled by the network.

Latimer will join Oranges executive management board and will be responsible for overseeing Oranges global expansion.

Tuckers final departure date depends on whether or not Vodafone Airtouchs Mannesman take-over bid succeeds. If they do win on February 7 he be free to go immediately. If Mannesmann triumphs it will take a few weeks longer. Tucker who was the engineering brains behind the Orange network is believed to not be short of firm options for future employment. None of which are with UK mobile operators. Not that he needs the money. His Orange share options are estimated to be worth more than 2 million.