@cje85 VM has been marketed on speed for many years but what will be their major selling point a few years from now? As things stand, prices are high, customer service is rock bottom, upload/latency are well behind the FTTP providers. Once the speed advantage has gone, what is left.
I'll tell you what's left! M&A, the perennial refuge of directors scoundrels who don't have a clue. Why put in the painful, hard slog to resolve difficult and long standing performance issues in your own business, when you can ignore them, and sit in meetings with rich, pompous City bankers, enjoy expense account lunches from advisers, accountants, and consultants, all explaining what a fabulous value creating opportunity this is?
And in this case, it's the VM/O2 merger, and the grand plan is (a) cut costs by more than half a billion quid a year, (b) both parent companies to divvy up £7 billion in cash between them, and (c) use VM's network to pump 5G traffic through.
You can imagine what will happen to both customer service and network investment if they need to save that much in operating costs...and then, if they pump 5G traffic into VM's already rather taxed network, well it doesn't bear thinking about. O2 claim to have "36.2 million customer connections", given the way that VM's upstream had such widespread constipation during lockdown, I can't see there being that much spare capacity available across VM's network. My background is in strategy for large corporates, and my heart always sank whenever it became known that the directors had decided they wanted to buy another company (or worse still many, as part of an "acquisitive growth strategy"). It always panned out badly, with benefits below business case, synergy benefits minimal, and costs higher.
