O2 will be bought by 3?

[cyrillicguy]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2922769/Three-swallows-02-10bn-phone-takeover-Giant-bought-s...

[Anonymous]

Lots of speculation.

Time will tell.

[cyrillicguy]

According to the article, it's a done deal. Just waiting for the European Commission approval.

[MI5]

As we already have a number of similar threads running may a mod could merge them all, please?

@Toby 

[jonsie]

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@cyrillicguy wrote:

According to the article, it's a done deal. Just waiting for the European Commission approval.

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So next year then....

[Anonymous]

It is anything BUT a done deal @cyrillicguy

Both the UK and EU regulators will be all over this and it might take months to get approval if it ever does.

However given some other countries in Europe have seen a reduction to 3 networks I suspect given some agreements on spectrum and competition concerns on MVNO's that it will eventually get the nod in some form.

[cyrillicguy]

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@Anonymous wrote:
It is anything BUT a done deal @cyrillicguy

Both the UK and EU regulators will be all over this and it might take months to get approval if it ever does.

However given some other countries in Europe have seen a reduction to 3 networks I suspect given some agreements on spectrum and competition concerns on MVNO's that it will eventually get the nod in some form.

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99.99% probability that they'll get a go-ahead, imo. Ok, it'll take some time, but it's likely to happen. They got it in Ireland, and look at Germany - it used to have 4 networks, but two of them - O2 and EPlus are both owned by Telefonica now. Not to mention a relatively recent example of Orange+T-Mobile=EE in the UK. I can hardly believe myself that here we used to enjoy benefits of 5 mobile networks competing for our custom, and now we are almost certainly down to 3. 😞

[Anonymous]

They've still got to agree a price for a start, and then let competion regualators have a look...

[jonsie]

It's going to have to be agreed by the Monopolies Commission before the ultimate decision if necessary by the European Commission. It all takes time but I'm sure  that  some agreement will be forthcoming. 

[Toby]

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@MI5 wrote:

As we already have a number of similar threads running may a mod could merge them all, please?

@Toby 

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Hi @MI5 ,

I'll merge all others to this thread from now on so please report them as normal. I've left the others, as they started out relating to rumours.