Leader: Orange vs orange - the juicy details

One of the big stories of the week has been the looming legal battle between Orange and upstart mobile start-up easyMobile. Two well-known brands rowing over a colour - it's juicy stuff, if you'll excuse the pun.

But the real story here hasn't been widely told and is significant for businesses across mature mobile economies.

Rumours of easyMobile's launch went back as far as the beginning of last year and by last summer this publication was talking about "Stelios' mobile company for UK scrooges". Last week some details as to how the successful entrepreneur plans to tackle the UK market, then a dozen or so others across Europe, were fleshed out as he addressed the 3GSM conference in Cannes.

And then we heard, late on Friday, about Orange's lawsuit. The plot thickens.

On the surface, plenty of commentators - especially lawyers - have been dissecting easyMobile's right to use the colour orange as part of the new brand.

France Telecom-owned Orange maintains it should alone use the colour. Orange is, among other things, well, orange.

But, retorts easyMobile, easyGroup ventures over the past decade (not a dissimilar lifespan to the Orange mobile brand) have been orange in colour too. Witness those easyJet planes.

Why can't they all just sort things out? It's not quite the same orange, some point out. Others say it's unlikely all but a few people will get confused. Yet others point out easyGroup is hardly in the same league as low-end con artists best known for so-called 'passing off'.

But the row goes deeper than this.

easyMobile will be run by Danish entrepreneur and Stelios Haji-Ioannou's new best friend Frank Rasmussen. He famously went from being a dot-com start-up type to being the person best-known for making the MVNO - that's mobile virtual network operator - model work. (Though we're betting folks over at Virgin Mobile might argue with that claim.)

He did so in Denmark, with Telmore. Telmore did so well at stealing low-spending customers from established networks that eventually it was bought by incumbent TDC. But TDC wasn't the only company feeling the heat.

Orange in Denmark was also hit. According to mobile analyst John Strand of Strand Consult, over a short period Orange spent close to 20 times Telmore's marketing budget but still found it lost out at the low end. It eventually sold up, Telia-Sonera the buyer. A 3G licence was handed back to Danish regulators in January, at a cost to its new owner.

Across a number of its territories, Orange rival T-Mobile is now ceding much of the low end. It is interested in higher-value, less fickle customers who it says shouldn’t subsidise budget users, at least that's to paraphrase the stance of T-Mobile chief exec René Obermann.

Such an approach is clearly positioning a big, established mobile brand as a place for business customers.

Why should we be surprised that T-Mobile embraces the MVNO model? It provides the infrastructure for the likes of Virgin Mobile, as of yesterday newbie ToucanMobile, an offshoot of IDT's fixed line consumer telephony brand, and soon easyMobile, naturally.

Orange and easyGroup are arguing about a colour and branding they both hold dear. But don't go thinking their animosity doesn't stretch farther.