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The boss of Vodafone has insisted the telecom company’s merger with rival Three – which has finally been approved by the regulator – will not result in higher prices.
The £16.5bn tie-up will create the UK’s biggest mobile network, with 27 million customers.
It has been given the go-ahead conditional on the merged companies agreeing to invest billions in the country’s 5G network and to cap certain mobile tariffs for three years.
Vodafone’s chief executive Margherita Della Valle told the Today programme, on BBC Radio Four, the deal would be “self-funded”, which meant “no extra costs from public funding and no extra cost for our customers”.
The regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had previously raised concerns that the deal could drive up people’s bills.
But Stuart McIntosh, who led the watchdog’s probe into the merger, said it had now concluded, external it was “likely to boost competition” in the mobile sector and should be allowed to proceed.
The CMA said there would be legally binding commitments on Vodafone and Three to invest in the UK mobile network infrastructure for eight years, while selected mobile tariffs and data plans would be capped for three years to “protect large numbers” of customers from short-term price rises.
The CMA has not outlined which specific price plans would be protected. It is understood this detail will be in a full report into the merger, which has not been published yet.
A Vodafone spokesman told BBC News that it had also not yet seen the CMA’s full report, but there should be more details on the affected tariffs “in the coming days”.
The rising cost of mobile phone contracts and other digital services has been an issue of concern for regulators as has the slow pace of the UK’s 5G roll out.
