Slashdot Mirror
BT To Buy UK 4G Leader EE For £12.5 Billion
DW100 writes: The UK mobile market looks set for a radical shake-up after BT confirmed it is now in final stage discussions to buy EE for £12.5bn. The move will see the telecom giant return to the mobile market for the first time in over a decade and make the company the leader in both fixed and mobile markets. Whether or not telecom regulator Ofcom will agree to such a deal, though, remains to be seen.
Let me run the numbers, in 1999 Cellnet was worth around £7bn - right around the time that BT bought out Securicor's stake, giving Securicor a return of many thousands of times its original capital injection of £4million in 1983. In 2002 Cellnet demerged from BT and relaunched as O2. Year on year, Cellnet/O2/EE has consistently compounded its profit margin.
Makes perfect sense.
Fuck me...
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Because we want Poland for ourselves...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The worst and second worst ISPs in the UK are joining forces to create a perfect storm of uselessness.
Fuck their products, fuck their services, just fuck them.
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Apart from British Gas (obviously), BT are the worst company in the UK.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You are assuming they are all acronyms - BT is not, it used to be an acronym for British Telecom but that changed ages ago as the company was colloquially known as "BT" and thus chose to change its name to BT. EE also isn't an acronym, but again it used to be for "Everything Everywhere" but again the company renamed itself.
The "UK" is, but 4G arguably isn't, its the common name of a technology.
My friends who use it, assure me that EE stands for "Extremely Expensive".
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As a BT Customer, I can assure you that it stands for "Bloody Terrible", and the buyout is only feasible because the telecomms regulator is as toothless as a wet cabbage.
My friends who use it, assure me that EE stands for "Extremely Expensive".
As an EE user I have to disagree. It actually stands for "Eencredibly Eencompetent."
As I discovered when they contacted me to suggest I go from Pay-As-You-Go to Pay-Monthly, on a plan that was actually financially advantageous. Only to find out the next time I was abroad, a week later, that there was no roaming activated on Pay-Monthly. I spent a week attempting to get through to customer service with no success ("We estimate we'll be with you in 1m", for an hour and a half). When I finally managed to get through to them back in the UK, they gleefully told me that roaming could only be activated on pay-monthly if you'd been with them for over a year (W... T.... F.....).
I calmly explained that it was *them* that had contacted me to switch plans, when I'd been using the roaming facility on my PAYG for a week out of every month in the past year, so could they kindly get their thumbs out of their arses and fix it or cancel my plan entirely. And suddenly it wasn't so much of a problem to instantly activate my roaming.
Why am I still with them? Best coverage in the UK and abroad, and best prices for my (very non-average, admittedly) usage pattern. But holy shit, are they ever incompetent.
Actually, even if they did stand for something, they'd be initialisms, not acronyms. /pedantry
Odd, since I rang up EE the day after getting my pay monthly contract (I switched from O2) and had them enable roaming without any issue - wasn't on hold for all that long either, a couple of minutes max.
The only limit they had was that they wouldn't unlock the phone until I had been with them for three months, to reduce fraud (where someone takes out a phone in a stolen identity, has the phone unlocked, and then ships it to Africa before the first bill hits the victim).
If BT do buy EE, will they be called BEE TEE?
Note that while " large ISP/Telco company." is not wrong it's something of an understatement. BT is the former state monopoly telco in the UK.
AIUI BT openreach (the part of BT that owns the physical lines) has an effective monopoly for about half of the UK households. For most of the rest they are competing against virgin media but virgin media don't sell wholesale. Theres a few small upstarts arround too but they tend to have negligable coverage areas.
Fortunately we have reasonablly effective regulation which allows competition at the service provider level despite the monoploy at the physical line level.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
AIUI EE is currently owned by deutsche telekom and france telecom, so this is one former state monopoly telco buying a buisness off other fromer state monopoly telcos, not a takeover of an indpendent buisness.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Theres a few small upstarts arround too but they tend to have negligable coverage areas.
BT is required to allow third parties to install equipment in the exchanges ('local loop unbundling'), and while most of the companies that take advantage of this are small local affairs, TalkTalk has quite a lot of coverage on LLU exchanges. Since BT won't sell naked ADSL lines, they've priced themselves completely out of the market in areas with Virgin Media coverage.
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or EECellnet?