Posts by Austin Montego 11 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2011
EE and now this VM/O2 merger have shown that two international firms can come together to create a single UK provider.
Comcast have only just bought Sky, though, so I doubt they're in any mood to further complicate their investment. And Vodafone seem unlikely to offload their operations on their home turf.
But where do Sky go? EE is owned by BT. There's Vodafone, which is presumably still slated to carry Virgin Mobile from 2021 unless they can get out of it with a change of ownership clause in the contract. Or Three, who as you say look ripe for a merger or acquisition ... especially considering Li KaShing's previously stated desire for such a merger.
Perhaps some people are motivated by fear but I don't see it, myself.
I've seen it kill teams and stifle otherwise good products. It works where a team of less-than-great people come together under a dictator, benevolent or otherwise, who has a strong vision and a stronger temper. It can't last, though, because the dictator is fallible and mortal. It also pushes away talented people who find they can work somewhere there isn't an arsehole making their lives a misery.
Ionica did indeed charge line rental: their service was marketed as a direct replacement for a landline. It was a fixed line style of service delivered at 3.5GHz using a network of line of sight base stations and little flat dishes on houses that are still visible in West Yorkshire, East Anglia and the West Midlands.
A minor nit-pick but Ionica was for telephone calls only, not broadband.
They had problems all of their own, including lack of base station capacity and the expense of building a line of sight transmitter network with voice calls and line rental as the only way to pay it back, at the same time as a boom in the number of alternative providers available over BT lines.
Went into one of the newly merged Curry's/PC World out of town shops the other day. It was to buy a TV that I knew was a good price and a good spec ... I could hardly believe it myself.
The staff on the floor were actually helpful and polite. However, when I got to pay, the guy behind the till went straight into the hard sell on the like-for-like replacement cover and then got mightily offended when I politely refused.
Until they remove the incentives that lead to that behaviour, they'll continue to alienate their customers.
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