UK watchdog fears Voda-Three merger will balloon phone bills for customers Britain's competition watchdog is worried the proposed merger between Vodafone and Three UK could lead to bigger bills for customers, a view rejected by the companies who see it as a chance to transform the local mobile market with fresh investment. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published its provisional view …
Voda were much worse for the 6 months I foolishly left 3.
3 have been rock solid for data since 2011. Never forget calling me friend from Tokyo on my DoCoMo FOMA phone which had a deal with Hutchinson to deal the first proper videophone international. Back in 2003/2004 that was.
Voda on the other had are horrible. The whole company is like a great big Phone Shop/mixed with Chavs collection. Their Xmas bash at Earl's Court had our unit (Global & Mobile Intenret) sat as far away as possible from them. Chav City it was.
Not only that, Vodafone lost out to the iPhone. Picture the science: Dusseldorf in the freshly repainted old D2 head offices now ours, Sept 10th 2001!. The small team of Global Stragey are gathered with me from Voda chairing. Sir Chris has left and some new CEO Harvard WASP twat thinks we should buy Yahoo! "We are at a crossroads", say I. "The new CEO wants David Beckham and the new Sharp camera phone we got when we bought J-Phone. Head Office in the Strand and Reading research both disagree. We want an app store that develops the i-mode model from DoCoMo. [Sept 10th 2001]
Guess how it went. We, moved on and no app store appeared. Beckham pimped the phone and Vodafone Live was just like ITV4: sweet, but sickly and only possible in short bursts. Apple took nearly 6 years despite us asking them to build a Apple Phone with a 'OSX mobile' using i-mode/Vodafone Live UI but with a c&xHTML-based app store a la i-mode in 2002.
But Vodafone are greasy. I worked with some boys and girls from the Newbury dev office and it isn't often that I felt dumb in comparison. They invented GPS location-based services and didnt sing about it. Just sent me an email saying plug this in. IQ150+. I bet they are at SpaceX or somewhere like that now.
when i say us, i mean me and the folks from Newbury. When we saw the closed garden Vodafone Live planned based of my style-guidelines for the old Ericsson r380, we approached Apple.
the plan was to get Apple to port to Java with a Sidekick-style slide keyboard & stylus based off a J-Phone exclusive we had from National (Panasonic to you) in the works. It had Java Mobile edition running as a VM or bare metal for the whole OS and that was in 2002! Apple just had to port a mini-version of OSX to Java mobile OS. We even had a whole team in Paris ready with their Java Beans brewing. It was the App store that again failed them. The OS port was not problem - we even reverse-engineered a demo for them on the pre-release National FOMA phone.
They just could not understand why and how an app sotre would fit into their hardware models. iMacs were all they thought about. Mobile was their naffy 2-cans-and-a-piece-of-string CDMA or some such nononsense.
Six bloody years to make an app store when i-mode had it in 1999! You give them the blueprints, the models, mock-ups and demos. On a plate. Even then it took 6 years to copy i-mode. I didn't hang around wating for 6 years. no sir.
Where are you now Toby? Any Commenturds who know this returd speak now.
To you, I ask: First, I was Head of Mobile Global and your role didn't interest me when your boss tried to lure me from Global to UK team when we were at the St James Sq office at a Xmas bash. Second, we sold you out to Apple even if it took then a long time. It was only a matter of time before that chap who replaced Chris was going to f things up. You were our conduit. We gave Apple nearly everything from Research wrapped up in a Java Mobile OSX VM. No need for an 'app' app. HTML will be fine. Run the browser outside on bare metal minimal OEM OS (Symbian probably) and sandbox the VM. That was for 2002. So they just updated the tech for 2007/08
Just because I won all those awards for the UK, French, Greek, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, German and more sites and you just won being moved into Business Development after Live failed to be rolled out globally 'cause it was closed garden u monkey and was never going to fit into all those different cultures.
And Voda lost the app store. Many of the Newbury folk from research moved away. I often think of them. There is a movie in them for sure. Me too. I returned to the source in Japan.
The the main reason Apple went for HTML5 apps initially until everyone said, "Are you mad? Just let them be native as this isn't 2002 and clock speeds can handle it now".
Our model we gave them used x/cHTML Openwave/Symbian browser with a Java sandboxed VM for Finder and dumb Phone OS functions. It made sense for them in 2006 to go HTML5 if you are working off something modelled 4 years earlier.
"We want an app store that develops the i-mode model from DoCoMo. [Sept 10th 2001]"
You mean the i-mode "concept" or to actually deploy i-mode infrastructure? By that date Vodafone OpCos in various countries had already deployed WAP infrastructure for a year or two.
"the plan was to get Apple to port to Java with a Sidekick-style slide keyboard & stylus based off a J-Phone exclusive we had from National (Panasonic to you) in the works."
J-Phone sold a National/Panasonic manufactured touchscreen phone (don't remember if it had a stylus) as far back as 1998, though obviously without installable "apps", just whatever the OS provided.
Three was great if you wanted to have a boring train ride.
I almost never could get any kind of reception on trains with Three in London.
Also when not on trains, it was common to walk around to find reception or to have reception in one room, but not in another.
I mean don't get me wrong, having no reception is a great excuse for not taking calls.
Finally ditched it for Vodafone which has been an improvement.
Did I mention poor customer service?
I really hope they don't merge this crap with Vodafone.
I left because Vodafone wanted three times the monthly cost of a SMARTY (3 subsidiary) contract. However it has to be said that there are several places I go where the data throughput on SMARTY is bad - the signal strength is usually okay so it must be something to do with MVNO bandwidth sharing. I never had that problem with Vodafone.
Anyway I'm sticking with SMARTY in the hope that if they merge I will get Vodafone levels of service for SMARTY pricing.
This seems unlikely for various reasons but..meh..worth a shot.
I left Vodafone because of their bullshit support (I knew far more than the idiots I spoke to in their support dept - and I know almost bugger all!). After a short stint with EE I ended up with Three. So, I'm hoping this merger gets completely canned.
Or we could just nationalise infrastructure, thereby saving 2/3rds of the costs of the backend because you all won't need to build your own masts and can share them properly, and then everyone becomes an MVNO and competes on the basis of provision of service.
Then, maybe, just maybe, I might get a 21st century connection in a rural area, and not have to have regular conversations like I had with a new neighbour where they said "What mobile phone network actually works around here" because his half-dozen devices on the "wrong" networks got pitiful signal.
The number of cell towers in the UK is ~1.5m. I'm pretty sure you could halve that, AND provide better speed and coverage.
People were saying competition had improved rail and energy until it became clear it hadn't. With telecoms, there's been such change of technology including that of customer service and UX that it's difficult to assert that competition has been the driver.
Also, with both gas, leccy and rail, the underlying infrastructure has to all intents and purposes been directed by government policy, and delivered as a monopoly. You can argue that there's multiple electricity network providers, but not to your office or house there aren't, and there's no real competition that consumers benefit from on the infrastructure side.
These things are natural monopolies (and fixed line telecoms certainly should be, rather than current poor effort in remote areas, and massive duplicative over-build in many densely populated areas.
"These things are natural monopolies (and fixed line telecoms certainly should be, rather than current poor effort in remote areas, and massive duplicative over-build in many densely populated areas."
From a Broadband perspective there is almost a monopoly in the UK, the vast number of UK ISPs use Openreach for customer fibre connections rather than building their own fibre infrastructure.
Virgin Media have their own footprint across about 60-70% of the UK population, so for the bulk of people they have a choice of two suppliers, and and collectively altnets aim to achieve a similar coverage in the next few years. I've got a choice of Openreach-ISPs, VM, and Lit, there's some locations that have five physical networks fighting for the same customers.
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"so for the bulk of people they have a choice of two suppliers"
Nope, the bulk of people have a choice of a large number of ISPs (I'd assume there are 150+ ISPs in the UK currently), the majority of those ISPs however use Openreach as *their* supplier for the fibre connection to the ISP's customers.
Openreach don't sell to the general public...
IIRC the actual cell towers and back haul were sold to a 3rd party.
Like Openreach delivering most of the switchless BB in the UK.
Except most people are not aware of this.
And of course Openreach are on course to cut off the copper line phone system in 2025, so now power failure --> loss of all phone service unless you bought a UPS for your router.
Currently you would need another FTTP provider to pass your property and it would require a physical connection change at your property. However VM have announced that they are going to launch a wholesale service so at some point in the future you will have a choice of ISP as you do on the BT network. How big that choice will be and when is unknown at the moment.
> In particular, they insist the coupling would not affect their pricing strategy
That's probably true: their current strategy is to increase prices by 3.5% in addition to the retail price inflation rate every year, which is a nice little earner for the phone company. Not so good for the consumer though.
Hmmm .... might sound a bit of a libertarian argument ... yuk .... but this market seems to be kind of working....
There are plenty of cheap £5 to £20 sim contracts from mvno's on a month by month basis with decent calls sms and data
BUT ABOVE ALL .... ***the option to put a £0 cap on your bill, so no unexpected bills, ever***
So surely the only people getting shafted are the ones who ....
1) are just ignorant of the above
2) know about above, but have enough monies coming in that they are not willing to put in the time to micro manage their finances
3) Have to have the latest shiny phone
As for quality of the mvno's ... there all the same now :)
Looking at the list of active UK MVNOs on Wikipedia, 2/3 of the independent ones are on EE. That doesn't suggest a particularly competitive market at present.
The MVNOs on other networks are mostly subsidiaries of the host operator (VOXI, Talkmobile, Giffgaff, Smarty) or commercial affiliates (Superdrug - owned by Three's parent group, Tesco - 50% owned by O2),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network_operators_in_the_United_Kingdom
I've just left them after 10 years to go to an MNVO on EE. The prices have been going up and up, and the service has been getting worse and worse. The final straw was them switching off 3G mid-contact, at the same time as applying an inflation-smashing mid-contract price rise.
The promise that they would improve 4G and 5G by turning off 3G has been absolute bullshit - instead half the time nothing better than 2G was available. So why should we believe that they would keep their promises if they merged with Three?
Since shifting to EE's network, I'm getting 5G most of the time, and 4G everywhere else. I'm just annoyed that I developed Stockholm Syndrome and put up with Vodafone's crap for as long as I did, and even more annoyed that my wife's contract still has another 6 months to run.
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