E-Plus

E-Plus is a mobile telecommunications operator in Germany. With more than 25 million subscribers, E-Plus is the third largest mobile operator in Germany, after Telekom (38 million subscribers) and Vodafone (32 million subscribers). E-Plus has been owned by Dutch telecommunications operator KPN since 2002. In July 2013, Telefónica Germany announced a planned takeover. The deal was approved by KPN shareholders in October 2013. As of December 2013, the merger is not completed because of concerns by the European Commission on reduced competition in the German mobile market. On July, the European Commission granted Telefónica's takeover of E-plus its conditional approval with final approval expected by the end of August 2014.

The company was awarded Germany's first DCS-1800 (later renamed GSM-1800) license in 1993. One term of the licence was that no further Mobile network operator could be started within 3 years of the start of the network.

The network started operation as a "metropolitan" network, with coverage only in the biggest cities, in 1994. The coverage area was expanded rapidly, but for years the network's image was hampered by the view that its coverage was lacking. As a countermeasure, voicemail retrieval was free of charge for the first of years of operation, and calls were billed in six-second increments (in contrast to the one-minute increments of the other networks); after text messaging was introduced, it too was free for some time.

E-Plus (disambiguation)

E-Plus can refer to: