Telfort was a brand of Dutch mobile

telecommunication Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

company

KPN Koninklijke KPN N.V. (Royal KPN N.V. in English), trading as KPN is a Dutch List of telephone operating companies, telecommunications company. KPN originated from a government-run postal, telegraph and telephone service and is based in Rotterda ...

. It operated a

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...

mobile telecommunications service in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

. It marketed itself as being the cheapest option available, and went to some lengths to give the appearance of being a

no frills A no-frills or no frills service or product is one for which the non-essential features have been removed to keep the price low. The term "Ruffle (sewing), frills" originally refers to a style of fabric decoration. Something offered to customers f ...

operator.

History

The company was formed in 1997 as a

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acce ...

between British Telecommunications (BT) and

Nederlandse Spoorwegen (, , NS ) is the principal passenger railway operator in the Netherlands. It is a Dutch state-owned company founded in 1938. The rail infrastructure is maintained by network manager ProRail, which was split off from NS in 2003. Freight operato ...

(Dutch Railways). In 2000, BT bought out Nederlandse Spoorwegen's shareholding. The group became part of the BT Wireless business and after its spin-off as mmO2, became known as O2 Netherlands. However, in 2003, O2 sold the company to Greenfield Capital Partners. It then reverted to the Telfort name. In July 2005 Telfort was sold to telephone company

. In October 2007, KPN, which had bought the Dutch operations of Tiscali some months earlier, rebranded Tiscali's Internet services as Telfort Internet. It has, since then, expanded its operations to include fixed phone lines and digital television (

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV), also called TV over broadband, is the service delivery of television over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Usually sold and run by a Telephone company, telecom provider, it consists of broadcast live telev ...

) subscriptions. In 2018, Telfort ceased to exist as a separate legal entity and became a brand name of KPN. In January 2019, KPN announced that it would eventually phase out the Telfort brand and continue operations under the KPN brand. The Telfort brand ceased accepting new customers on 1 May 2019. Existing mobile customers were migrated to the KPN brand in January 2020. Migration of fixed-line VDSL customers started in September 2020.

References

External links

* {{Dutch mobile operators BT Group Dutch brands KPN Mobile phone companies of the Netherlands Nederlandse Spoorwegen Telecommunications companies established in 1997 Telecommunications companies disestablished in 2019 1997 establishments in the Netherlands 2019 disestablishments in the Netherlands