My view of the merger doesn't seem to have been reflected by anyone else.

I think that for competition we need 3 & o2 to merge. Competition with 2 inferior networks will not keep EE pricing reasonable.

Three balanced players with the capacity & infrastructure to compete equally should give reasonable prices. Why compete on price when the other networks are inferior?

Add some MVNO obligations to cover the people on a budget with lower expectations (speed caps etc) and competition should work.

Three and o2 cannot compete on their own. Especially with no multi play options like BT, Virgin, talk talk etc. Vodafone have a cash pile to save then.

Anyone else agree or am I out on a limb?

They go hand in hand. No good having wonderful 2G coverage when you want fast data and there's no 3G or 4G...

Vodafone is the worst of both worlds - poor 3G/4G coverage where I am, and poor performance where it does exist.

I agree 100%. It was madness to duplicate the infrastructure five times over. It's still madness to have everything duplicated four times over. You only need two players to ensure competition so having three is a bonus.

I said something very similar in the actual merger thread. In fact the BT one was (in my view) more likely to cause competition concerns due to the multiple levels of the food chain that they were able to control, including backhaul etc and then again when it comes to controlling the market with multi-play and loss leaders in one sector, funded by another to manipulate the market.

There's no point in allowing that and creating mammoths like BT EE and then holding back the smaller operators and setting them up for long-term failure. As everyone knows I have always been of the opinion that with concessions this will get the go ahead, much to the anger of some who are very certain it won't and from the start were certain it wouldn't even be on the cards (the OP said this, then had to eat his words).

Their global HQ in HK has been demanding more profit and that has resulted in the loss of One Plan and the recent price hikes in anticipation of the merger with O2 as they will do a 5 year price freeze.

By making AYCE a lot more expensive they are now less competitive than the other networks.

Those who really benefited from AYCE (ie: rural / non-fiber areas) will getting fibre or equivalent by 2020 if they haven't already and have little incentive to pay extra.

I hope BTEE results in cabinets becoming mini-masts, that would be awesome.

"fibre" = satellite for the very rural, extremely long copper FTTC lines for the semi-rural, FTTP for some extremely lucky people (who probably live in Cornwall or are covered by networks not owned by BT). 4G will probably be faster than that. BT's investment strategy working wonders.

Can't see "cabinet-masts" working without regulatory hurdles. The cabinets (where they exist) are not BT infrastructure, they are Openreach's. Yes, BT owns Openreach (though that may not stay that way) but there is operational separation to stop the retail arm (inc. EE) getting favourite treatment. They'd have to offer it as a wholesale product for the other networks to join in if they wanted to.

They'd be better off putting femtocells on telegraph poles or something (still owned by Openreach, but much broader coverage). Maybe they will as the fibre glacially progresses toward the home?

It's interesting to speculate what the merger might mean. For one, they wouldn't need to offer VoLTE because they could then take advantage of O2's 2G spectrum. They could use the 800MHz for actual LTE data?

Having access to Cornerstone sites as well as MBNL sites could in theory give them the best coverage of any network (especially with a mix of Three's 3G and O2's refarmed 3G as well). They could make that their brand proposition. They would be a slower more congested network but they'd also have the customer base to make it worthwhile.

It doesn't have to be a speed competition with EE (whose network performance I do find delicious on my iPhone 6S - especially getting 90Mb+ in the office on 4G+)

I always thought that Virgin Media (now Liberty Global) should buy/merge with Three. It must be awkward that Virgin Mobile (is it still the UK's biggest MVNO?) is now running on the network of their quadplay rival BT.

This is, in my mind, one of the principal competition concerns of the merger - an operator straddling both of the infrastructure sharing arrangements. Leaving aside regulatory concerns, I can't really see how EE (partner in MBNL) and Vodafone (partner in Cornerstone) could readily accept that, and can imagine all sorts of ways in which they could make it difficult for a merged Three+O2 to operate (I think there's been some suggestion that EE have in various ways already made some things difficult for Three).

Tesco Mobile is the largest MVNO these days.

But yes, it does seem a bit awkward. However I don't think BT/EE are likely to cause problems with their Virgin Mobile MVNO, lest the regulator comes down on them like a tonne of bricks!

Ideally all network operators should be sharing all infrastructure. It's madness to have everything duplicated four times over. It's like having four separate rail networks or four National Grids or four different sewer systems or a network of four different & incompatible TV broadcasters.

The flipside of that is what happens when the shared infrastructure goes down - as happened last week with an outage at BT - which was mostly confined to BT's own customers, although it seemed to affect everyone on the BT Wholesale network too (regardless of their ISP).

The nice thing about having some separation is that an MBNL failure shouldn't affect VO2.

Network Rail owns all of the rail network in GB, but they do have lines for freight use only

TV broadcasting isn't a great example because it's not that centralised - short of a mast or power/cooling failure (which generally has lots of redundancy anyway), an issue should only affect a handful of services. (FWIW, the BBC and what was then the IBA for ITV/Ch4 *did* have sites that they owned separately, and it took them a while to begin sharing the more important ones - though either company kept ownership of their own sites, the other renting space - it was only in the mid 2000s that the two privatised companies merged into one)

But thats what the licences promoted. Don't blame the networks, blame Government.

But that means no competition.

Interestingly, Voda are currently on course to beat Three when it comes to bringing 4G to this town. How embarrassing

Not all. There is plenty of competition among the energy suppliers & there is only one set of infrastructure for gas or electricity. The network operators would need to compete on service & price if coverage were a level playing field. Prices overall would also be lower simply because the cost of infrastructure would be reduced to a third or a quarter of present levels for any individual operator. Government regulation of a wireless equivalent of OpenReach with an obligation for universal provision would ensure better national coverage than any single current operator.

Slow data 2G that realistically is only good for voice/sms only is better than no signal at all

Not at all.
You'd still have competition on price, bundled allowances in tariffs, network features (WiFi calling etc), maybe speed, phones available etc etc.

IMO it would actually mean more competition as it would mean that every network would be available from every mast, meaning that some places that are essentially currently single network monopolies will actually for the first time ever have competition in terms of which network customers can choose.

............EE decides to rise its price by 10%, its a nice day the chairmans been offered a bonus. o2 see's this and it gives them options, rise their price by 9% and still claim that they are value? keep it at the same to see if they can get more customers? Check what 3 will do??? But what would 3 do, raise their prices by 9% and still claim they are value ? etc

That's why monopolys are bad but really only having 2 options isn't any better ( actually it can be worse). That's why the 3 o2 merger is terrible for customers but really good news for chairmen on bonuses.

I don't think it's really fair to compare mobile networks to energy suppliers - all electricity does the same, but with mobile networks, your experience varies from network to network, instead of just being on or off.

MVNO's have a lot of competition and they use a main network infrastructure. 4 Main networks is better than 1. Countries with state-owned monopolies have lower market penetration rates than competitive ones. Openreach is crap, I only got 25Mb down/5Mb up at my house and BT customer service couldn't give a shit when my internet kept disconnecting - so Virgin Media dug up the road and extended their cable to my house, and I now get 200Mb down/12Mb up, so I really don't want a wireless version of Openreach.

I can get faster download speeds on EE than anyone can get on BT FTTC. The only reason Virgin Media is only 200Mb is because they have virtually no competition other than BT.

Openreach is also pretty much completely ignoring FTTP, even though it's the only proper solution. A wireless version would probably have us all still on 3G.

The problem for consumers with all this consolidation is it basically eliminates all operators as market disruptors hungry to gain share. Until now, Three have been disrupting the market by undercutting the established players significantly on price to gain share. It helped keep rivals in check. Now Three's owners have decided the new path is a merger so that they can become a lot more profitable with higher pricing and more customers than ever before.

BT also re-entered the market with some pretty aggressive pricing. They were looking to pick up customers while also trying to conclude a deal to grab EE. Now that deal is concluded BT no longer needs to offer aggressive mobile pricing under the BT Mobile umbrella. They say they will maintain two distinct brands at the moment with different service and pricing, but for how long who knows. BT doesn't have a history of holding prices low for long when they have room to jack them up a lot higher. The idea behind quad play packaging (from an investors perspective) is companies compete on services, features and content offerings and not necessarily price.

I think both the BT/EE deal and the Three/O2 deal will in combination be a disaster for consumers.

The only ray of light for consumers will be Sky with their mobile offerings and entrance into the quad play market later this year. I'm sure Sky will go into this aggressively and that may keep BT/EE in check. But Sky being a MVNO their options are likely to be more limited on how aggressive they can be.

2G is useless for me. I mostly need fast data and occasionally phone or SMS. 2G is the same as having no signal in my opinion - especially when it isn't even EDGE.

So, I'm not about to join either of two networks where I'm going to be on 2G 90% of the time, and non-working 3G for the rest

To be fair, both Virgin and Openreach are sweating their assets. Virgin's connection is delivered to you via a decades old cable TV network - it's just that they're fortunate that their network is capable of more than BT's twisted pair copper.

Neither company are going to be rolling out FTTP on a large scale for a long time, unfortunately. Virgin are more likely to do it than Openreach, who thinks that horrific bodges like G.FAST (all of the effort and cost of FTTP, none of the benefit) are the future

My proposal was for Government regulation of a wireless equivalent of OpenReach with an obligation for universal provision to ensure better national coverage than any single current operator. The Royal Mail is regulated such that they must deliver to every single premises in the UK at the same flat rate. I would propose similar obligations should be applied both to OpenReach (who have already received billions in subsidising broadband roll out) to provide minimum broadband speed of 30Mbps/2Mbps & to a new Wireless OpenReach providing universal access to 4G services.

Well it doesn't really matter if it's decades old, it's fibre cables which are the future. While Virgin Media's isn't technically FTTP, it's a lot closer than BT's is. It's fibre on your street and then coaxial from there to your house, a lot better than fibre half a mile away and then copper to your house.