29M customers, four radio suppliers, and one hell of a network headache

Network engineers can take solace from the completed merger of Three and Vodafone announced today, as the difficult technical work now starts to unify their separate networks over the next several years.

The union of the two mobile operators, imaginatively named VodafoneThree, was given the go-ahead by UK regulator the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) at the end of last year, despite fears of possible price rises, and completed on May 31.

It aims to meld Britain's third and fourth largest cellular firms into an operation capable of competing against the other two local giants – BT/EE and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2).

The new third force in telecoms promises to invest £11 billion over the next decade – a condition of the merger going ahead – in order to create what it claims will be one of Europe's most advanced 5G networks. The result will give "millions of customers and ...