T-Mobile and Orange won’t hand over any of the radio spectrum that they own when they merge companies for other mobile operators to make use of for services such as mobile broadband.
The merger will make the combined T-Mobile/Orange business a 50:50 split between the two companies and give them a mobile market share of 37% in the UK.
They will however also hold between them 170MHz of the 1800Mhz spectrum, which is almost half and don’t feel that they should need to give it up for their merger to be approved.
Three Mobile only have a 15MHz share of the 1800Mhz spectrum which at present is only able to transmit 2G GSM technology, but that is soon to be changed.
So The T-mobile/Orange company will have 37% of the mobile customers in the UK but almost half of the 1800Mhz spectrum to play with.
There is also the fact that Vodafone and O2 have hold of the entire 900MHz spectrum between them so it looks like a bit of a stale mate, with neither majority holders of each of the spectrums likely to give any up unless the others also do.