Vodafone and Orange to share radio networks

A HISTORIC agreement has been reached in Britain by two of the country's five mobile operators - Orange and Vodafone - to share their respective Radio Access Networks or RANs.

This will not only cover their existing 2G networks but also current and future 3G capacity. In theory the agreement should make it easier for both to provide blanket 3G coverage for the UK.

As Orange UK CEO, Bernard Ghillebaert, put it, "As the industry matures we must look at new ways to serve our customers and this provides a common sense approach to network roll out and management in the twenty-first century."

All that the pair are really doing is sharing the radio bit. Which makes perfect sense as they use different technology for 2G, yet the majority of base stations can now be configured to transmit more than one operator's signal.

This leaves each operator free to determine its own service offering using its own spectrum. The operators can even paint the move as being 'green'.

Since they are effectively sharing sites, masts and antennae, there won't be a need to duplicate such installations. They're still working out how they can charge each other for access to the RAN.

After all, somebody's got to maintain the combined networks and pay for rolling out new bits.

This leaves the question of how their rivals will respond. The obvious next coupling would be O2 and 3. That's because 3 uses O2's 2G network in the first place. And O2's 3G roll out has been much more leisurely than its rivals.

So in a nutshell, it's T-Mobile which is most commercially threatened by the new Orange/Vodafone alliance. µ