Eurobites: VMO2 weighs in on Vodafone/Three merger

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Vodafone plans logistics hub in Luxembourg; Arcep on virtualization; French turn to GenAI for love-letter assist.

Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe

October 4, 2024

3 Min Read
O2 logo on a smartphone being held up in front of a Virgin Media sign
(Source: Ascannio/Alamy Stock Photo)
  • Virgin Media O2 has nailed its colors to the mast in the ongoing hoo-ha over the proposed merger between rival UK operators Vodafone and Three, declaring in its formal response to the Competition and Market Authority's latest pronouncements on the deal that "permitting the Merger subject to the spectrum divestment and amended Beacon network sharing arrangements … will deliver the best outcome for UK consumers and businesses." (Beacon is the network sharing venture between VMO2 and Vodafone.) Indeed, VMO2 goes on to say that the proposed spectrum transfer associated with the merger will have a "transformative effect" on its own network, allowing it to increase capacity rapidly. (See Vodafone and Three merger not to be trusted on 5G, says watchdog and Eurobites: Vodafone and Three snap back at UK competition watchdog.)

  • On the other side of the coin, however, Which?, the influential consumer rights organization, very much shares the CMA's view of the proposed merger, stating its belief that the merger will  "likely lead to horizontal unilateral effects and higher prices for consumers" and that the CMA is "rightly sceptical of the parties' stated plans for investments post-merger."

  • The wider Vodafone group is to create a new logistics hub to hold mobile and fixed network equipment for its European markets. It will be located in Luxembourg, from which Vodafone estimates that 88% of its in-market warehouses in Europe can be reached within 24 hours. The first trucks are expected to reverse out of the hub in 2026.

  • French communications regulator Arcep has been looking into what virtualization/cloudification/IT-ization of networks means for the telecom industry, concluding, among other things, that "use cases" arising from this process are not yet clearly defined and that some IT services will replace legacy telecom services, leading to a "combination of software and connectivity solutions." The main conclusion of its briefing note, however, seems to be that it is really too early to tell where the network virtualization trend will take us. Arcep interviewed more than 20 companies for its study, Bouygues Telecom, Iliad, SFR and Orange among them.

  • The European Court of Justice has ruled that access by the police to data contained in a mobile phone is not necessarily limited to cases of serious crime. The case came to court after Austrian police seized the mobile of someone who was on the receiving end of a parcel containing 85 grams of cannabis and vainly tried to unlock it to access the data therein, much to the phone owner's displeasure.

  • Ericsson's data mediation software – which collects data from different parts of the network and processes it into a standardized format – has found a home at Bangladeshi operator Grameenphone in what the Swedish vendor says is one of the world's largest such deployments.

  • Meta is expanding its information-sharing partnership with UK banks, which is intended to reduce financial fraud. NatWest and Metro Bank are the first British banks to participate in the pilot of Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) program, though more are scheduled to join, says Meta. Among the early successes of the pilot was the takedown of a significant concert ticket scam network attempting to target people in the UK and US.

  • Just when you thought romance was dead a survey commissioned by Deutsche Telekom arrives to defrost your cold, cold heart: More than 40% of people surveyed in France would use AI to write love letters, it found. Zut alors, sacré bleu et shoot me now.

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Europe

About the Author

Paul Rainford

Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading

Paul is based on the Isle of Wight, a rocky outcrop off the English coast that is home only to a colony of technology journalists and several thousand puffins.

He has worked as a writer and copy editor since the age of William Caxton, covering the design industry, D-list celebs, tourism and much, much more.

During the noughties Paul took time out from his page proofs and marker pens to run a small hotel with his other half in the wilds of Exmoor. There he developed a range of skills including carrying cooked breakfasts, lying to unwanted guests and stopping leaks with old towels.

Now back, slightly befuddled, in the world of online journalism, Paul is thoroughly engaged with the modern world, regularly firing up his VHS video recorder and accidentally sending text messages to strangers using a chipped Nokia feature phone.

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