Here at Hackaday we’re suckers for old abandoned technologies, the more obscure the better. The history of the telephone has plenty to capture our attention, and it’s from that arena that something recently floated past our timeline. [IanVisits] reports a sighting of a Rabbit in a London Underground station. The bunny in question definitely isn’t hopping though, it’s been dead for more than three decades. It’s a base station for a failed digital mobile phone system.
We’ve had a look in the past at CT2, the system this Rabbit base station once formed part of. It was an attempt to make an inexpensive phone system by having the handsets work with fixed base stations rather than move from cell to cell. It was one of the first public digital mobile phone systems, but the convenience of a phone that could both receive calls and make them anywhere without having to find a base station meant that GSM phones took their market.
The one in Seven Sisters tube station is a bit grubby looking, but it’s not the only survivor out there in the field. We have to admit to being curious as to whether it’s still powered on even though its backhaul will be disconnected, as in our experience it’s not uncommon for old infrastructure to be left plugged into the wall for decades, unheeded. Does anyone fancy sniffing for it with a Flipper Zero?
Now turn the logo upside down.
Turn it 90 degrees left. Quack quack!
“Does anyone fancy sniffing for it with a Flipper Zero?” ….. The Met police have reported seeing suspicious groups of people huddled under the Rabbit sign in the Seven Sisters underground station.
Funny, we had something here in Germany, too.
It worked with special cordless phones and was called “Birdie”, another animal name.
The phone had to be in range of certain stations (50 to 300 metres), usually being phone booths.
Maybe every country had such an experiment going on once?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8JREvSgzE&t=50
Yep, I guess like PTT Greenpoint in NL?
was called Kermit for a while iirc
I took my Rabbit cordless phone on holiday to Germany and was able to roam on the Kermit network there…at least that name sounds familiar.
That takes me back! I never knew anyone who used it though
I did.
it was £6 per month plus call costs, although you could use the cordless phone as a home phone on a base plugged into the land line. The system also came with a radio pager. Quite clunky now I think about it. I do still have the handsets (x3) and bases (x2) and the original box.
It was replaced with Orange, however, Orange didn’t go live prior to the demise of Rabbit, so Hutchison provided me with a Cellnet (O2) alternative at the same price & included the handset. Subs for Cellnet at the time started at around £25 per month.
The audio quality of the handsets for home use was very good, compared to other cordless phones of that era. I had a few of these but eventually they gave up the ghost. I also recall seeing something very similar to the Hutchison telecom rabbit headset being used on a flight to swipe credit cards…
Hey don’t remove it! I still use it to make my calls!
Well then, you should be the one to clean off the cabinet.
B^)
I can´t reach it :)
If it was installed anywhere near my ‘hood, it would be full of holes where people had used it for target practise.
Better than the alternative.
Walls around it are full of holes, where people had used the sign for target practice.
I knew I had found my house, street sign 50 feet from driveway had bullet holes. Those kids are grown now.
New batch is OK. Someone has ox/acetylene tanks, balloons and fuses. Summer night explosions usually stop by 10, usually.
This being in the London underground, it’s not going to have been used for plinking.
And about the only road sign sign in the UK covered in bullet holes was the hungerford one, which got shot up in the massacre.
This is simply not true. Road signs here where i live (UK) are routinely targeted by bullets. That rabbit sign would be a target too tempting to resist.
Used to have a Ferranti ZonePhone (one of the other Telepoint licensees in the UK, along with Rabbit- https://cntr.salford.ac.uk/comms/telepoint.php.html#content ) as my home phone for a while- it was pretty decent quality compared to the analogue ones available at the time, and you could use it at the public access points- if you could find one!
“Does anyone fancy sniffing for it with a Flipper Zero?”
Let’s promote proper hardware instead of helping this overhyped Flipper…
Do you have name of “proper hardware” ? I am interested to find about new things !