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In the UK, T-Mobile and Orange To Merge
EthanV2 sends in BBC coverage of the merger plans of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK. "T-Mobile and Orange plan to merge their UK businesses, creating a mobile phone giant with 28.4 million customers. If completed, a deal between Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile and Orange owner France Telecom would see a firm with sales of €9.4 B (£7.0 B, $13.4 B). It would be the UK's largest provider, overtaking Telefonica's O2, with about 37% of the mobile market. ... However, it is likely that competition authorities in the UK and EU will probe the deal."
...given the high barriers of entry to the market place (i.e. it's not really possible) and the low number of competitors.
Didn't 3 prove over the last 5 years that entry to the market-place is perfectly possible? And, as The Register notes:
The UK mobile industry is one of the most competitive in the world
So I don't imagine anyone's going to stop this...
I have read that such a deal would probably result in a total monopoly on the back end for Ericsson.
Thus the networks (Vodafone, O2, Orange-Mobile and Three) could have their operating costs pushed up, which would be passed on to the consumer.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
Not really, most of the MVNO's have been bought by the operator that owns their network. There are no large independent MVNO's anymore.
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and T-Mobile owns 93% of Era which is the third largest operator in Poland.
Since somebody is clearly removing all the posts that are actual spam, couldn't they remove ones like this while they're about it?