Virgin Mobile out too
That's the danger of being a MVNO.
Any chance OFCOM might encourage some competition by forcing merged operators to sell one of their licences?
EE's 2G and 3G data services are struggling this afternoon after what seems like a power equipment failure caused problems at the telco's switch sites. Customers in the UK have been complaining about "a major outage of 3G data," with one Reg reader saying that at 5am this morning access point name connection requests were …
Orange itself seems to be an MVNO on EE's network now, in that the 234-33 network appears to have been completely switched off - and old Orange SIMs thinking they're roaming.
Rogers did exactly the same in Canada back in 2004/2005 when they bought Fido, they shut off Fido's own network turning it into an MVNO on Rogers.
Actually there should be NO competition at physical RF, everyone should be an MVNO as that would double or triple capacity, because spectrum is such a limited resource.
You'd need a MUCH better regulator than Ofcom with serious teeth.
Then make 100% Geographic coverage at a minimum data rate / voice quality at typical indoors downstairs.
It's not like making baked beans, handsets or cars in terms of competition.
Similar applies to Electric Grid (but not Generation), Gas network, water network, sewage network, fibre to home, letter delivery, rubbish collection etc as you only want to have ONE of these for efficiency.
By all means have as many retailers you like.
It needs seriously good regulation to work, which SHOULD have been put in place before BT was privatised. Ofcom is useless as they don't care about any interference unless it affects big licence fee commercial operators. They only care about a level playing field between big commercial operators, not critical infrastructure, protecting broadcast from SMPSUs, Electronic Ballasts and "power line" ethernet (really illegal transmitters). They do not care about the consumer.
FCC is pretty broken too or "Lightsquared Fiasco" would not have happened.
Comreg copies all Ofcom's and FCC's worst ideas and only exists to raise revenue.
All three want to abolish broadcast, Ofcom and Comreg bizarrely want to abolish FM and AM even though the spectrum is no use for anything else (DAB licences and DAB benefits National broadcasters and blocks out of area / out of state, so politics?).
"Lessons will be learned from this, new procedures will be introduced to make sure that it doesn't happen again in the fu...."
"This happens at least once a year!"
"Indeed. The lessons we learned are that when it happens so little it doesn't cost us a lot in lost revenue and that those ranting about it will shut up after a week or so."