Oh bugger.
As usual, the authorities have completely missed the elephant in the room, in this case the MVNOs on 3.
So why do Vodafone want this to go through? Well, if you look at their model, you'll find that if you get a phone and plan on a long contract, it's a massive saving over buying the phone outright and taking one of their SIM only offerings. A great deal, right?
Wrong. The problem here is that their SIM only plans are outrageously overpriced when you look at the likes of ID mobile or SMARTY on 3. Now, it's quite difficult to draw price comparisons as they are really bloody good at obfuscating the deals by breaking out voice, data, roaming etc. However, I reckon if you were daft enough to take, say, an iPhone 16 on, say, a 48 month contract, you'd pay somewhere around double what you would by just buying the sodding thing outright at the lowest price and then chucking a tenner a month at one of the MVNOs. I guess the CEO's new Merc doesn't pay for itself every year.
Best bit of vodashit is their offering of unlimited data which I strongly suspect involves a very interesting interpretation of the word "unlimited". I'm forced to wonder if I'd actually be allowed to get more than my current 100Gb limit. I reckon this feature only exists to make price comparisons more difficult, although I also reckon that you catch a lot of sheep using "iPhone" and "unlimited" as bait.