This is from a 22 February article in City AM, the free business newspaper handed out in the financial parts of London and other UK cities. If you're in the UK, you may want to consider implications to coverage and costs.

ORANGE and T-Mobile look set to become the UK’s biggest network after their long anticipated merger received the thumbs up from Brussels.

A drawn-out investigation by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) looked likely but a string of concessions appear to have smoothed the way for the merger to go ahead as early as this week. It is expected both brands will be retained.

The most important concession is a new deal struck with 3, the UK’s smallest mobile network, to allow it to use 16,000 of the new firm’s mast sites, 3,000 more than under its previous deal with T-Mobile. Orange and T-Mobile have also agreed to relinquish a quarter of the contentious 1800MHz bandwidth, which allows super-fast fourth generation mobile internet.

Full article at http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analy...merge-t-mobile.

we had news of this back in november 09 at cpw, the rumors were that o2 and vodafone were also going to merge their networks, but its been really quite as to who's doing what since

The new bit was really the numbers for tower sharing with 3. I like 3 because they aren't into port blocking, but their tower could (and evidently will) be improved.

i think its a great idea for networks to share coverage, it would be better for everone, consumers would have more choice, retails would have more customers

That depends on level of service. If sharing of networks opens up the way for more operators like they have with utility, broadband, trains etc, you may get better pricing but service often suffers.