Arcor
| Arcor AG & Co. KG
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|---|---|
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| legal form | AG & Co. KG |
| founding | May 30, 1996 |
| resolution | March 8, 2011 |
| Seat | Eschborn , Germany |
| management | Friedrich Joussen |
| Number of employees | 3,588 (November 2007) |
| sales | EUR 2.308 billion (2007/2008) |
| Branch | telecommunications |
| Website | www.arcor.de |
The Arcor AG & Co. KG was up to the acquisition by Vodafone on 19 May 2008 after the Deutsche Telekom the second largest fixed network - telecommunications company in Germany. Their seat was in Eschborn . On August 1, 2009, Arcor AG & Co. KG was renamed Vodafone AG & Co. KG . At the same time, the brand change from Arcor to Vodafone took place for the entire product range of the fixed line and internet provider.
On March 8, 2011, Arcor AG & Co. KG was deleted from the commercial register and therefore no longer exists as an independent company.
Corporate structure
Shareholders
Vodafone initially held 73.65% of the shares. The German Bahn AG (18.17%) and the German Bank (8.18%) sold in May 2008 its shares for 474 million euros to Vodafone so that Vodafone was the only shareholder.
Branches
Arcor had nine regional branches nationwide in Berlin, Dresden, Essen / Düsseldorf, Frankfurt (later Eschborn), Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart.
Day-to-day business
Arcor was among the telephone companies , which has its own fixed network to the level of local exchanges have, but from there the connection lines of Deutsche Telekom took advantage. Arcor had expanded its network to include local exchanges for around 66% of households; for the remaining households a connection exists to the Arcor wide area networks at the level of 475 telephone network - interconnection points or 74 High-PoPs Telekom.
At the end of 2006, Arcor began migrating its classic circuit-switched telephone network to a more cost-effective NGN infrastructure; Initially, only the telephony of the complete offers of customers who could not be reached via collocation was implemented via T-DSL resale -based IP telephony . As of spring 2007, the company's own voice telephony offer was no longer marketed as Arcor ISDN , but as Arcor voice connection . New customers were increasingly connected via the NGN connections and integrated access devices (and no longer using conventional ISDN technology) when they could be reached by means of collocation, which led to increasing dissatisfaction among customers.
In November 2008 Arcor finally announced that it would give customers the choice between classic ISDN technology or NGN connection technology . The ISDN - telephone connection is called since then phone comfort connection Classic referred.
Arcor had recently achieved a turnover of 2.3 billion euros (2007/08) with approx. 3600 employees. The company was the second largest fixed line operator in Germany after Deutsche Telekom . The end of 2006 had 1.9 million customers with ISDN - telephone connection with Arcor, 1.7 million of them in conjunction with a DSL connection. 1.3 million customers had chosen via preselection to have Arcor set up as a network operator on their Telekom connection, and 2.3 million used the call-by-call option to make calls via Arcor or to go online . With around 2 million DSL customers (as of 2002/2007), the market share of broadband connections was over 12%.
From 2007, connections made via the company's own DSL network were increasingly marketed on a wholesale basis, initially through the main shareholder Vodafone, and from 2008 through other resellers such as United Internet .
history
Arcor emerged from a joint venture between Mannesmann and Deutsche Bank called Communications Network International (CNI). In June 1996, CNI took over 49 percent of DBKom , the outsourced telecommunications division of Deutsche Bahn . This resulted in 1996/97 the former Mannesmann Arcor AG & Co. KG , which after the takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone in & Arcor AG & Co. KG has been renamed. On August 1, 2009, Arcor AG & Co. KG was renamed Vodafone AG & Co. KG. In December 2009, Vodafone AG & Co. KG was transferred to Vodafone Verwaltungs-AG.
The fixed network area of o.tel.o communications was taken over by Arcor on April 1st, 1999 for 2.25 billion DM (1.15 billion euros).
Arcor has been Deutsche Telekom's largest alternative competitor in Germany since the beginning of the complete liberalization of the telecommunications sector in the fixed network area.
Since April 2005 Arcor has also been one of the providers for IP telephony (also known as "Voice over IP", or VoIP for short ). At Arcor, this service was established as "Arcor VoIP" and initially integrated into the "Personal Internet Assistant" ( PIA for short ). Due to the change to NGN technology for the provision of conventional voice telephony at subscriber lines with subscribed DSL , IP telephony has been increasingly used as a control technology since the end of 2006.
As announced in a press release, Vodafone discontinued Arcor products on August 1, 2009 and integrated them into the Vodafone product range. From August 1, 2009, the previous Arcor AG operated under the name Vodafone AG in the Vodafone group of companies in Germany. On 10 December 2009, then with the Vodafone D2 GmbH Vodafone AG merged .
A web portal (arcor.de) is operated under the brand name Arcor, which also provides access to various web services. After taking over germany.net , Arcor first began to appear as a web host for private customers under the web portal arcor.de later with nexgo (a web hosting service for business customers had existed since it was founded). However, this field of activity was completely discontinued on January 31, 2017, which means the end of both paid and free private websites under the URL home.arcor.de . Some services of arcor.de platform as the e-mail - accounts , however, continued, but new registrations are no longer possible.
Integrated holdings
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o.tel.o communications GmbH & Co., November 2001
o.tel.o was operationally integrated into Arcor in 2001. The brand has since been discontinued and has been revived by Vodafone since 2013. - Würzburger Telekommunikations-Gesellschaft mbH (Wücom), January 2002 The
shareholders were Würzburger Versorgungs- und Verkehrs-GmbH (WVV), Städtische Sparkasse Mainfranken Würzburg, Bayernwerk NETKOM GmbH, Bayerische Landesbank Girozentrale and Überlandwerk Unterfranken Mediendienst GmbH (ÜWU). WüCom was merged with Arcor and has not existed as a separate company since then. - Arcor Online GmbH (formerly germany.net), October 2004
Arcor Online GmbH was the successor to callisto germany.net GmbH and was taken over with the acquisition of o.tel.o. It was integrated into Arcor and no longer exists as an independent GmbH after the transfer of operations . - ISIS Multimedia Net GmbH & Co. KG., December 2005
With the latter integration, Arcor wanted to strengthen its own position in the Düsseldorf administrative region. The merger of the business activities took place retrospectively as of April 1, 2005, the beginning of the Arcor financial year.
Origin of name
The name should stand out from the field of telecommunications providers. After developing and testing around 10,000 international name creations, the choice fell on the name Arcor, created by Nomen International. The reason given was that "Arcor" was short and concise and radiated dynamism and competence. The semantics of the name play with the "golden bow" (French l'arc d'or ), the bridge to the customer.
Arcor in the sights of the dispute over age verification
In September 2007, Arcor got into a legal dispute between operators of pornographic internet offers about age verification , whereby Arcor blocked access to the video portal YouPorn and similar foreign websites without a judicial or official blocking order addressed to Arcor and only activated them again after it became known that The ban also affected a wide range of harmless web content and customers protested.
Between 23 October 2007 and 20 February 2008 locked Arcor to access one of Kirchberg logistics requested, due to competition law enacted injunction of the sixth Civil Chamber of the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main to access youporn.com again, with the relatively easy defeatible manipulation of the name server was used, which means that no other websites were affected by the block. Since 19 other providers did not comply with the access blocks requested by Kirchberg Logistik as a result of the judgment, Arcor decided on November 22, 2007 to take legal action against the interim injunction that had been obtained, as it did not want to be the only provider obliged to block it. In the further course, other courts rejected identical requests for blocking orders against other Internet access providers and the Frankfurt regional court overturned the blocking order against Arcor in the main proceedings on February 8, 2008.
Customer loyalty
One point that repeatedly led to criticism of the company and its methods was the termination conditions of the contracts for the end user. The regulations in the terms and conditions permit termination at the earliest two months before the end of the contractually agreed minimum term, which was 24 months as standard for telephone or internet connections . In the event of expiry and failure to terminate, this minimum term was automatically extended by a further 12 months. If the consumer moved with his connection, the minimum contract period started again at 24 months. Most of the new Arcor offers were only available to new customers, however, a change for existing customers was only possible - if at all - in connection with a change fee.
Sponsorship
After previously participating as main and shirt sponsor, Arcor had expanded its sponsorship of the Hertha BSC football club as an exclusive sponsor . The sponsorship was taken over from the 2006/07 season by Deutsche Bahn AG.
Arcor had an E-Sport - factory team in connection with the set World League eSport Bundesliga named Arcor Electric Eleven .
See also
- BASA - the former telephone network of the German railways, from which the Arcor telephone network developed
- DBCom
- o.tel.o communications
Individual evidence
- ↑ Vodafone takes over the power of manager-magazin.de from June 27, 2008, accessed on June 26, 2019
- ↑ Arcor offers a choice between ISDN and VoIP . In: heise.de, November 6, 2008
- ↑ Manager-Magazin: Mannesmann Arcor buys Otelo fixed network , April 2, 1999, accessed on August 6, 2008.
- ↑ Vodafone press release: Successful change to an integrated communications group from May 19, 2009, accessed on May 22, 2009
- ↑ Vodafone press release: Arcor AG will be called Vodafone AG from August 1st
- ↑ Vodafone press release: Vodafone D2 GmbH and Vodafone AG merge.
- ↑ Arcor blocked numerous websites . In: heise.de, September 17, 2007.
- ↑ Arcor stops the porn filter . In: Spiegel Online , September 17, 2007.
- ↑ Arcor has to block YouPorn. Update . In: heise.de, October 23, 2007.
- ↑ Arcor no longer has to block YouPorn . In: heise.de , April 15, 2008.
- ↑ Arcor AGB ( Memento of December 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 147 kB), December 13, 2008.
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 7 ′ 59 ″ N , 8 ° 34 ′ 33 ″ E