Tens of millions of customers face higher mobile phone bills if a proposed £18 billion merger between Vodafone UK and Three goes ahead, the competition regulator has warned.
Setting out its provisional findings on the deal, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it also feared that the merger would harm wholesale telecoms customers, such as Lyca Mobile, Sky Mobile and Lebara, which buy from the network operators to provide mobile services.
However, its previous concerns over the sharing of mobile towers with BT have been assuaged.
While the regulator conceded that the merger could improve the quality of mobile networks and bring forward the deployment of next-generation 5G networks, it argued that some of the companies’ claims were overstated.
It said that the