Sim Mobile

British Telecom (BT) has finally completed its goal of building the largest Wi-Fi hotspot network in Britain with over one million Wi-Fi hotspots now available!

BT’s Wi-Fi customers are on track to spend over a billion minutes online through their Wi-Fi service this year alone. A lot of this activity is due to the launch of the iPhone as BT have agreements in place with O2, Orange and Vodafone so their customers can use the iPhone on BT Wi-Fi network free of charge.

Wi-Fi access is available for homes, businesses, high street chains as well as city centres. This is made up from the BT FON community and BT openzone.

BT are launching a competition on the 11th February to find the millionth hotspot! Check it out at Twitter.

More information available here.

France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have both announced today that they will merge there UK operations to become the biggest UK mobile phone network.

The deal is currently under review by the regulatory authorities which should be completed in the first half of 2010

Orange & T-Mobile Joint Venture

Timotheus Höttges, Deutsche Telekom CFO said:

‘This joint venture is based on the full commitment of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom to a long-term partnership.

‘The negotiations were conducted in a fair way on both sides and I am certain that this spirit of professionalism and partnership will shape the future of our joint venture. It will set new standards as the number one in the UK mobile market.’

It will be interesting to see how this pans out for current customers of both Orange and T-Mobile. And what will the knock on effect be for general consumers? Is this going to reduce competition and encourage industry wide price rises?