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CMA looked closely at whether merger could lead to reduced competition.
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Read more.Quote:
CMA looked closely at whether merger could lead to reduced competition.
WTF? how is that a good idea? Competition is evaporating. ee got subsumed into BT. Now virgin and O2? So your choice is three, VO2 or BTee. Brilliant. Is it me or are our regulators utterly useless, spineless and/or biased towards big companies?
Well it's always been O2, EE or Three.Quote:
Originally Posted by ik9000
BT and Virgin were just wholesalers of EE and O2 respectively so technically the competition isn't reducing at all.
Edit: Always as in the recent 5-10 years since Orange/DT got rolled into T-Mobile and T-Mobile UK got sold off into EE.
don't forget about the Vodafone network
Probably has a civil servant totally not moonlighting for them,and they totally have no financial donations made to political parties at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by ik9000
Oh yeah, and Vodacrud!Quote:
Originally Posted by Boon72
So yeah, you're not exactly starved for choice because a lot of these "providers" are actually just wholesalers of the existing network. The network diversity isn't changing, it's just another ISP model is absorbing another ISP model to have under the same roof. Not surprised, the writing is on the wall for a while as BT and Virgin both got more aggressive with their "offers" and bundle deals. The amount of times i've said no to Virgin Mobile was practically criminal.
I have a Virgin media broadband account and I get a "free" sim. all you can eat calls, texts and minutes means it's a virtual no brainer cost wise...
I never have to worry about it as it's free (and there really isn't a catch)
This sort of thing has been happening since the year dot, I remember the old days of Cellnet, one2one, T-Mobile, Orange.
It's a constant cycle of companies buying other companies purely to buy their customer base usually.
the catch is that you already are paying for the sim with your broadband + price increases every year, there is no such a thing as free in corporate companyQuote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
No price increases for 2 years, the deal is cheaper than many others are paying...Quote:
Originally Posted by aniilv
It's because we have homephone and broadband and tv...
I like the sound of lower costs as the almost yearly price increases from VM takes the wee, not that I'm expecting we'll actually see lower costs or an end to the yearly price increases.
EDIT: Oh wait, i thought this was new news. :(
Because without the merger O2 (an actual network) would have quit the UK, which would have mean we lost o2 plus potentially a number of other Virtual networks. So that would have been more of a competition loss.Quote:
Originally Posted by ik9000
Virgin was looking as they used to share EE but obviously got told to take a hike when BT consumed EE, so they could have easily quit the whole biz too.
This at least keeps the number of actual networks (EE, Voda, 3 and O2) the same, so they can all compete for the virtual networks, as i'd imagine end consumers are mostly irrelevant at this level.