# 3 Mobile merging networks with T-Mobile & Orange?



## Badgers (Dec 20, 2011)

I thought I read recently that the 3 Mobile network will be joining the Everything Everywhere network along with T-Mobile & Orange. Did I imagine this?


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## Minnie_the_Minx (Dec 20, 2011)

Virgin has and for the first time ever, I can now get a signal in my flat


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## TruXta (Dec 20, 2011)

I think this is right, pretty sure I had a 3 network on my T-mobile phone the other day.


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## joustmaster (Dec 20, 2011)

i left t-mobile after they merged with orange as it had killed my 3g bandwidth by so much


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## Badgers (Dec 20, 2011)

TruXta said:


> I think this is right, pretty sure I had a 3 network on my T-mobile phone the other day.



Can't find any report of it


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## spanglechick (Dec 20, 2011)

joustmaster said:


> i left t-mobile after they merged with orange as it had killed my 3g bandwidth by so much


how would that make itself known. i haven't noticed any ill effects...


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## souljacker (Dec 20, 2011)

joustmaster said:


> i left t-mobile after they merged with orange as it had killed my 3g bandwidth by so much



Are you sure? It's only roaming between networks, I can't see how it could possibly make your connection worse.


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## magneze (Dec 20, 2011)

I've noticed that my 3G signal is better tbh.


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## joustmaster (Dec 20, 2011)

I guessed it was down to Orange being oversubscribed and tmobile being available. 

I, on tmobile, noticed a significant drop in usable internet. The mrs, on Orange, noticed her internet being improved over the weeks after the switch.


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## editor (Dec 20, 2011)

It'll be the three of the most complained about networks in a tree. Kissing.







http://www.mobilechoices.co.uk/guides/most-complained-about-mobile-network.html


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## magneze (Dec 20, 2011)

joustmaster said:


> I guessed it was down to Orange being oversubscribed and tmobile being available.
> 
> I, on tmobile, noticed a significant drop in usable internet. The mrs, on Orange, noticed her internet being improved over the weeks after the switch.


Weird. I'm on T-Mobile.


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## Citizen66 (Dec 20, 2011)

I hope it's true. T-mobile signal in my home town is pathetic.


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## spanglechick (Dec 20, 2011)

none of them have many complaints though, by those figures.  even 3 only have 0.015% complaining customers.

funny, though - we're all coloured by our own experience. I'va always been treated very well by t-mobile, whereas vodafone fucked me around for the entire length of my contract with them.


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## joustmaster (Dec 20, 2011)

editor said:


> It'll be the three of the most complained about networks in a tree. Kissing.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


are they considered high amounts of complaints? the numbers look small to insignificant, to my untrained eye.
0.004% - 0.015% of customers


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## spanglechick (Dec 20, 2011)

magneze said:


> Weird. I'm on T-Mobile.


me too - and i've only noticed an improvement. maybe it's regional.  t-mobile used to be mercury one-2-one, didn't it, going waaaaaaaay, back - and i'm pretty sure that was a london-based network.  maybe t mobile has more subscribers in london.


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## editor (Dec 20, 2011)

o2 have easily had the best telephone support of all the networks I've been on.


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## Badgers (Dec 20, 2011)

editor said:


> o2 have easily had the best telephone support of all the networks I've been on.



They do in my experience too.
I thought Vodafone were pretty poor.


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## editor (Dec 20, 2011)

T-Mobile had the best 'travelling to Wales' coverage (admittedly a niche market) but their support was really, really awful. I was with them for ten years and they still wanted me to pay £100 more than a new customer for an upgrade.


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## Diamond (Dec 22, 2011)

I would be mighty surprised if this was the case.

3's 3g network is miles ahead of the others and forms the basis of pretty much all their competitive edge.

They might be able to extract large licence fees from the other networks by hawking it around to them in the short-term but it'd surely be madness from a medium-term business perspective.


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## teuchter (Dec 22, 2011)

editor said:


> It'll be the three of the most complained about networks in a tree. Kissing.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



It would be interesting to see a graph of complaints per average cost of phone use, for each operator.

3 might have 50% more complaints than Orange, but Orange contracts are a zillion times more expensive than 3 contracts.


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 23, 2011)

joustmaster said:


> are they considered high amounts of complaints? the numbers look small to insignificant, to my untrained eye.
> 0.004% - 0.015% of customers



There's not a huge amount difference between the top three either. No one company seems to have steller customer service...


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 23, 2011)

But back on topic...I've not heard of this tbh but it would make sense although my 3 reception has been excellent (and great in places where O2 and Vodafone were shite too which is a bonus!).


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## UnderAnOpenSky (Dec 23, 2011)

At least Orange and T Mobile don't have an indian call centre painfully working their way through irrelevant scripts until you throw your phone across the room in frustration.


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## mauvais (Dec 23, 2011)

I'm fairly sure the Competition Commission (or whatever it's called this week) wouldn't be too keen on that. Four operators has been regarded as the ideal situation for a very long time.


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## joustmaster (Dec 23, 2011)

mauvais said:


> I'm fairly sure the Competition Commission (or whatever it's called this week) wouldn't be too keen on that. Four operators has been regarded as the ideal situation for a very long time.


they aren't merging companies. Just the antenna network


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## Diamond (Dec 23, 2011)

mauvais said:


> I'm fairly sure the Competition Commission (or whatever it's called this week) wouldn't be too keen on that. Four operators has been regarded as the ideal situation for a very long time.



True, but merging networks doesn't necessarily mean merging products or narrowing the market.

It would be an infrastructure agreement several levels upstream of the final consumer product.

I stil don't see why on earth 3 would do this though. It makes no sense. They have sunk huge amounts of money in their 3g network and have consequently made losses year after year. IIRC, they only turned a profit for the first time in 2010.

Why the hell would you forgo your hard-won competitive edge through some kind of supine licensing agreement that grants your direct competitors access to your far superior network?


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## joustmaster (Dec 23, 2011)

Diamond said:


> True, but merging networks doesn't necessarily mean merging products or narrowing the market.
> 
> It would be an infrastructure agreement several levels upstream of the final consumer product.
> 
> ...


maybe the stuff 3 installed is now soon to be out dated and they need help upgrading? 4g and all that


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## Diamond (Dec 23, 2011)

Unlikely.  Your 3g phone still heavily relies on 2g networks.

Any 4g phone will also need access to 3g networks.

Also, 3g has taken years to get going.  There's no reason to think that 4g won't take the same time period.  The sunk costs in upgrading or creating a network are unimaginably large.


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## mauvais (Dec 23, 2011)

The infrastructure costs just to survive are already insane - no source, but I recall that O2 spend multiple £million a day just to maintain an adequate level of capacity (not just bandwidth but signalling). I'm not a standards expert but some technical aspects of 3G are fairly painful for operators. 

With that in mind, moving to LTE probably isn't that expensive in some ways - not the same as 2G to UMTS was.

Anyway I agree with Diamond - doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense from a user experience PoV either - it's not trivial to enable true domestic roaming for the average customer, and doing it across competing and simultaneously available operators would be a nightmare. The reason Three could do it originally was because they simply didn't have any 2G provision.


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## stuff_it (Dec 23, 2011)

editor said:


> o2 have easily had the best telephone support of all the networks I've been on.


If it doesn't go wrong you don't need telephone support, though I suspect this is what TalkTalk's owning concern thought at some point in the distant past, before realising that they could sidestep the issue completely by simply not having any customer service to contact. I get the impression that none of the mobile networks are quite into the TalkTalk realms of shiteness yet.

Also isn't there some sort of monopolies and mergers issue? 

How much market share would this new merged network take up assuming that all customers stayed with them?


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## editor (Dec 23, 2011)

stuff_it said:


> If it doesn't go wrong you don't need telephone support....


In my case it was the phone that went wrong. Twice.


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## stuff_it (Dec 23, 2011)

editor said:


> In my case it was the phone that went wrong. Twice.




Doh!


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 23, 2011)

O2 must have got amazing, they were shite when I was last with them just over a year.


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## spanglechick (Dec 23, 2011)

stuff_it said:


> Also isn't there some sort of monopolies and mergers issue?
> 
> How much market share would this new merged network take up assuming that all customers stayed with them?


But they'd still be competitors. Like t mobile and orange. 
I see it as being like cashpoints during the nineties. First you could only use your own bank's, then you could use some but not others, finally you could use them all. 

If that wasn't a monopolies issue, why would this be?


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## editor (Dec 23, 2011)

My O2 broadband went down a few weeks ago at 2.30am. I rang them up and got a real live human talking to me. In the UK. And they knew what they were talking about. I was impressed.


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 23, 2011)

spanglechick said:


> But they'd still be competitors. Like t mobile and orange.
> I see it as being like cashpoints during the nineties. First you could only use your own bank's, then you could use some but not others, finally you could use them all.
> 
> If that wasn't a monopolies issue, why would this be?



Good point, same with text messages I believe...


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## mauvais (Dec 23, 2011)

spanglechick said:


> But they'd still be competitors. Like t mobile and orange.
> I see it as being like cashpoints during the nineties. First you could only use your own bank's, then you could use some but not others, finally you could use them all.
> 
> If that wasn't a monopolies issue, why would this be?


T-Mobile and Orange did merge. In the UK they're now the same company, so network sharing works: when service is rubbish, customers have one provider to blame, for instance. 

I don't know, but I imagine cash machine sharing was imposed on banks to improve competition in the face of branch closures, and not driven by the banks themselves .


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