The parent companies of Orange and T-Mobile have offered concessions to the European Commission on their merger to ensure the deal gets the go ahead, according to reports.
France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have told the European Commission's anti-trust investigators that they are willing to ensure deals for network sharing as well as selling off some of their sought after spectrum allocation, said The Wall Street Journal, citing its source as "a person familiar with the situation."
The UK merger is currently being looked into by the EU, but there have been calls from both competitors and regulatory authorities on these shores that the deal should be looked into in more detail over here before it gets the thumbs up.
John Holmes, a spokesperson from Which?, told IT PRO back in December: "This is a joint venture between UK subsidiaries only so only UK consumers will be affected. The only reason to have it looked at by Brussels is a technicality [down to parent company revenue]."
He believed that the commission should refer it to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), and the OFT itself called on Europe to let it look at the merger earlier this month.
We contacted both mobile companies and the European Commission for comment but they had not responded to our request at the time of publication.
