T-Mobile UK and Orange to merge, still clash
By Thomas Ricker 
posted September 8th 2009 2:36AM
posted September 8th 2009 2:36AM
Step aside O2 and Vodafone, there's a new sheriff in town. At least there will be if the announced 50:50 merger between T-Mobile UK and Orange can be signed into existence by November as planned. The new venture would give France Telecom and Deutsch Telekom units a 37% share of the UK mobile marketplace leaving O2 with 27% and the once mighty Vodafone with 25%. Let's hope that the corporate cultures mix better than orange and magenta.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Damn as an o2 customer I enjoyed being #1, I wonder if they will have a new name or something.
EU anti-trust monitors and the U.K. Competition Commissions can't be happy about this.
Why?
There's still at least 4 companies so competition will be fine!
@LordPaul
Think about what happened in Canada when Rogers bought out Fido and in the United States when AT&T Wireless merged into Cingular. It reduced the number of companies providing mobile phone service in each country by just one, but the service fee skyrocketed shortly afterwards.
When the number of players are in the single digit territory and no new player can enter (at least until the next spectrum auction, which could be 5~10 years away), just one merger can make it much, much easier to create a price-fixing cartel and keep everyone in line.
What do you mean no one else can enter? In the UK there are hundreds of smaller networks such as ASDA, Tesco and Blyk.
@fanman
They are MVNOs. They don't own the network, but rather buy minutes wholesale from T-Mobile, Orange, etc. and resell them.
If the players that actually own their own network collude and jack up the wholesale price, MVNOs also have to increase their prices.
Now I know it was waaaay back, but if I recall my Business classes at school I thought that legally no two companies in the UK could merge if it would give them over 30% of market share. Something about anti-competitive legislation...? I could well be mistaken though, it was a long time ago now.
They compete in the advert space but never compete on price.
orange + purple = what?
It would look like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/geekthree/3899869990/
:)
This isn't good. :(
What they will have to do is give back some of their spectrum as there's currently a spectrum cap for UK carriers. I wonder if that will allowed a new company to join the market?
Not in the UK there isnt.. no caps.. (yet!)
A 130Mhz cap is coming very soon.
So will they call themselves O-Mobile or T-Orange?
A twitter friend of mine came up with T-angerine. He's @mattcopp
@Grindboy
T-angerine, I like it :D
Also like the friuts themselves too :P
...and remember nothing rhymes with Orange
Orange you wrong?
Door hinge does. But only if you want it to.
Porridge.
grunge?
Wrong!
flange rhymes with orange
I replaced the faulty flange while eating a fresh orange
Vodafone is still very mighty. No matter what country in the EU you fly to, when you get off the plane, there's an ad for Vodafone for the country you just landed in. As Europe draws together and becomes a more interconnected place, Vodafone becomes stronger and stronger.
You sound like a Vodafone customer in denial...
Nonsense. Vodafone is not represented in all EU states, and never has been. They have even sold some of their networks. Just recently they sold Vodafone Sweden [to Telenor], very clearly an EU member state!
will this mean new pay monthly plans? and if so will they be cheaper or more expensive? my contract with orange ends in feb, i was thinking of leaving them for t-mobile but now the decision depends on how much thier plans will cost!
I wish google entered the UK market with a beast of a network and some awesome handsets NOT made by crappy HTC.
Google are you kidding me? they would record all your calls and farm it off to the US and use it against you... no thank you!! anti-google! :)
Oh and by the way, most Android phones are HTC at the moment...
Seing as 3 and T-Mobile have a cell sharing deal and now T-Mobile and Orange would merge, this could mean that the coverage for 3, T-Mob & Orange customers could get a LOT better?
"will this mean new pay monthly plans? and if so will they be cheaper or more expensive?"
Less competition can only lead to higher prices.
In Yorkshire, they will now be known as T'Orange, and people will go down t'phone shop to buy t'phone from t'sales assistant, then go t'pub to show off their new t'phone while they have a t'pint with t'mates.
(You may need to be from t'area t'get this)
i'll have to check on the t'internet in a sec...lolz
+1 t'internet for you
South yokshire here!
t'pub.. ha, awesome.
Hmm...
http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=huymqjmmhwh&thumb=5
For some reason I am really craving a doughnut...
T-Mobile and Orange have "merged" in The Netherlands already. Guess where is Orange now? It has been rebranded as ONLINE.NL - fixed internet provider fully owned by T-Mobile.
Anyone things in UK things will be different?
Their UK execs won't sit around eating pancakes and smoking spliffs?...
The French rolled over for the Germans? SHOCKER!!!
~joke~
;)
re:
'o-mobile & t-orange'
'orange + purple = what?'
>>> 'Oraple' or 'T-Orable' (short for 'totally horrible' surely?)
seriously though, both of these companies are under performers, although t-mobile have new release of android on payg. orange still have a hideous track record (home broadband anyone?). this merger can only be good news for consumers.
now, what if o2 and vodaphone merged???
If O2 and Vodafone merge, I'm leaving the country. O2 have a Midas touch, of sorts... they turn everything they touch to shit.
The Andrex® touch?
@matt:
Haha love it - i'm so using that in the future!
I got distracted when I read the first sentence 'Step aside O2 and Vodafone, there's a new sherif in town'
http://www.answers.com/sherif
What has Muhammad got to do with mobile phones...
I hear he unlocks all makes and models of phone as well as selling little stickers that flash when your phone rings
Oh good. The two companies with the worst signal in Britain and who bastardize every piece of phone firmware they encounter have joined forces to create one genuinely annoying company. Just what the UK market needed.
I get better signal strength on orange than with 3. I insisted they gave me an unbranded phone too XD
Worst signal in Britain? Where do you live, out of interest?
Orange is great everywhere I frequent, and it's the only network with any kind of coverage in North Wales... my Vodafone signal craps out there all the time, and I never used to bother even turning my O2 phone on it was that bad.
I spend half my time in Reading and the other half in Swansea (I go to Swansea University).
I'm on O2 at the moment and the signal is rock solid everywhere. I get full HSDPA coverage in Swansea and Reading, to a point where I'd occasionally use my old n95 for bittorrenting. It was that fast.
Before I started a new contract I was looking into the HTC Touch HD but it was only available on Orange (for a reasonable price) but the HDSPA coverage is non-existant in Swansea but reasonable in Reading. I lived at the top of a block of flats during my first year at university and 3 of my friends on Orange didn't have signal half the time, so I decided against it and just went for a CrapBerry on O2.
I don't like what Orange and T-Mobile do to phone firmwares. My friend was showing me his n95 on Saturday and it was running an Orange bastardized firmware version. All the menus were different and it was incredibly slow.
Years ago I bought a Pay&Go Samsung D900. I bought it on Orange first because it was a few quid cheaper. I switched it on and within 15 minutes I'd taken it back and bought another one on O2. Firmware was ruined and it was just too laggy.
That's my main reason for running with O2 for all this time. The most they do is whack an O2 logo on the start up screen and leave it at that. Can't argue with that, and with my N95 and ShitBerry they didn't even do that. Both came unlocked too. Happy days.
I'm on T-Mobile in Hull and I have 3G is all the places I frequent. My parents are both with Orange and they too have no signal problems (my stepdad travels around the country with work and never has any problems).
I do agree with you though on the firmware issue, both T-Mo and Orange ruin fine devices with their slow buggy ROMs. I've had two MDAs in the past, both of which I've reflashed with either vanilla HTC or cooked ROMs. Currently using a Touch HD on T-Mobile (bought subsidised wth T-Mo contract from Expansys) and its great!
Interesting. It's funny how different experience of networks can be around the country. O2's 3G network coverage is _supposedly_ one of the best (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/08/3g_coverage_maps/) and O2 one of the worst, for instance, but clearly that's not the case for you.
My main complaint against O2, as a customer of theirs for several years, was their craptastic "pick a random three-digit number" billing system and customer service... but that's another story.
Truth is, the colors orange and pink go well together! Very "mod".