Vodafone said to be mulling T-Mobile UK bid Vodafone is mulling a multibillion-pound swoop for T-Mobile UK, according to a report. T-Mobile UK's German owner Deutsche Telekom has appointed JPMorgan to advise on how to offload the business, The Financial Times reports. Talk of a Teutonic retreat from the British mobile market intensified last month when T-Mobile UK's …
Personally I dont want this deal to go through.
We have just appointed a new MD for the UK and want to see his ideas for turning the company around. The financial crisis is hitting our core market (pre-pay) hard and this will turn around in time.
With the spectrum auction / allocation coming up, if T-Mobile can secure a sizable chunk of lower frequency, it will certainly help ensuring wider coverage - especially in buildings and rural areas.
Sure there are other issues - need to improve our handset range, have more competitive price plans just to start. We have a great 3G network and need to bring up other pillars of our service in order to take back more market share...
I hope your right , I've been on all the mainstream networks in the UK and in my opinion T-Moble has given me the best service and value for money, but to echo your comments I think their mobile phone range is starting too look very skeleton especially considering the fairly robust 3G network and the brilliant web'n'walk tariff. As it is my next phone upgrade wn't be done through T-Mobile but a 3rd party instead.
Been with T-Mobile for 18 months now, more or less since I came back to the UK after 24 years abroad.
Coverage is indeed excellent and there's a comprehensive HSDPA network there.
But...
Packet data is important to me, which is why I'm on a web'n'walk plus deal with a 3GB allowance and streaming allowed. And this is the reason I just jumped from T-Mobile to O2. Even though I get a full 3.5G signal on all 4 of the phones I've tried this with, and the packet data connection is established, no data actually flows half the time. When it does, it's sometimes slower than GPRS (ie., forcing the phone to GSM mode results in faster data). If it does speed up to a dizzying 300 or 400kbps, it'll run like that for a minute, cut out for 30 seconds and then start again. This makes streaming wholly impractical.
O2's coverage is less impressive than T-Mobile's, but at least the data connection works.
Oh, and I have loads of contacts throughout Europe, none of whose networks have agreements with T-Mobile UK for MMS reception. T-Mobile UK users can only send MMS messages to users of SFR in France. Users on all other networks simply receive an SMS (in English so they can't read it) with a link to a page on t-mobile.co.uk and a password. With O2 (and any other network in the UK for that matter) I can just send an MMS and the recipient will receive an MMS. T-Mobile customer service spun me some cock and bull story about how they have roaming agreements with Orange and Bouygues as well, and how it should therefore work. How stupid do they think users are? Anyone with half a brain knows that this has nothing to do with roaming agreements and I resent T-Mobile thinking that I _don't_ have half a brain.
My number is being ported to O2 this week.
Was looking forward to going back to TM when my current contract expires with the bunch of incompetent t*ssp*ts and thieves that use a fruity name to distinguish themselves expires. I hope TM stay away from Voda et al coz they are the only company not to have p*ssed me off by their incompetence or greed.
As a unimpressed vodaphone mobile phone customer (after been stung to many times), and recently a new T-Mobile mobile broadband customer, I personally hope that T-Mobile UK would not let any other fat cats take over their UK business. T-mobile is currently offering the best value mobile broadband service in the UK (specially for people who cannot get normal ADSL broadband due to long distances from the telephone exchanges) and I would happily recommend the service to any of my friends or anyone else out there looking for mobile broadband (both for home or business use).
Certainly there are certain issues with mobile broadband connectivity that may put people off such services (this problem in fact afects all of the companies out there providing such mobile services) but I got to say that I have personally manage to overcome such connection issues (hint: a bit of google search and you also should be able to find the solution for such connectivity issues (hint: the more people know how to resolve the issue the more busy the network usage becomes, hence why I'm not making it public how to resolve the issue, sorry)).
I got to say, from experience in today's cross border shopping, German companies are much more customer focused then all the UK fat cats put together. I hope word of mouth will help T-Mobile grow in the UK and be able to survive this dificult times... maybe T-mobile should just give existent users a free month usage for each new customer they can bring onboard to the excellent pays as you go mobile broadband service they currently offer(£15 pounds unlimited downloads(fair usage applies, but not hidden charges like the rest of the fat cats).
Thank you T-Mobile, Keep up the good work.
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