Suggesting strongly that their marketing advisers spent too much time in a small, brightly lit room, guzzling enough espresso to keep a small army awake for a year, Orange UK and T-Mobile (UK) have announced the new name for their UK joint venture: Everything Everywhere.

And no, it's not April 1. This is no joke.

The laughter potential is high, though, especially when the company suffers an outage (as it likely will, at some point) and gets referred to as "Nothing Nowhere."

Everything Everywhere is the new company that, from July 1, will be the UK's largest mobile operator with more than 30 million customers. But the Orange and T-Mobile brands are not going away. Everything Everywhere will retain the two retail brands so they can compete as distinct entities with their own shops, propositions, and service centers.

The 50-50 joint venture of Orange (NYSE: FTE)'s and Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT)'s UK subsidiaries has catapulted the country's third and fourth mobile operators into the leading market position in terms of subscriber numbers, surpassing rivals Telefónica UK Ltd. and Vodafone UK . (See T-Mobile, Orange Join Forces in UK, EC Clears Orange, T-Mobile UK Merger, and T-Mob, Orange Complete UK Merger .)

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Now, the new company wants to use its size to expand its service offerings beyond mobile communications and tap into new revenue streams. For example, the company believes it can generate new revenues from mobile advertising and mobile commerce, and has plans to introduce more services for business customers.

Scaling up, cutting costs
With the task of choosing a gobsmackingly bizarre name completed, the company now has to deal with the serious stuff -- a major project involving the integration of the two operators' networks and IT systems. The aim is to merge the new partners' GSM (2G) and HSPA (3G) networks, reducing the number of basestations and cell sites to cut out duplication, and create a single "super network," according to today's press release.

One result of the combined network resources will be that Orange and T-Mobile customers will be able to roam between the two networks at no additional cost, which is planned for later this year.

When the joint venture was announced in September 2009, the companies said the integration would lead to workforce reductions. According to an Orange spokesman, a restructuring process is underway for the top 150 director-level senior management positions, but there is no specific plan for further job cuts at this stage.

The new, combined company has 16,522 staff, with 11,626 coming from Orange and 4,896 from T-Mobile. The CEO of Everything Everywhere is Tom Alexander, who was CEO of Orange UK. Richard Moat, who was CEO of T-Mobile UK, becomes Everything Everywhere's CFO and deputy CEO.

The new partners expect the merger to result in total cost savings of £3.5 billion (US$5.1 billion) by 2014, according to a spokesman.

— Michelle Donegan, European Editor, Light Reading Mobile