The announcement in yesterday's press (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11199786)about the merger of the Orange and T-Mobile networks is potentially a "Game Changer" for the UK mobile phone industry.
Last year, Orange and T-Mobile announced a merger of their companies to form a new joint venture, named earlier this year as Everything Everywhere. The apparent concept being that by being a customer of this company you would be able to access "everything" while you were "everywhere". However, the marketing approach has always been to keep the two brands separate. The only way that this could be achieved is through joining the two networks together so that customers get the best of both worlds.
The question I have though, is: How will Vodafone and O2 respond?
Merging two networks together is not a simple case of plugging one cable into another and watching the traffic flow. Each cell will have to be re-dimensioned to check that it can cope with the new, potentially combined demand. If a particular location is served by both Orange and T-Mobile, how long will they continue to keep them as separate networks compared to providing a single network that just directs the CDR to one brand or the other? For that matter, for how long will the two companies provide separate Billing and Customer Care environments?
Once the two networks are properly connected (not just the "inland roaming" that is currently being proposed) at what point will a single Billing environment be catering for both sets of customers?
The solution to these questions are the domain of Capacity Management. Existing systems are built to support around 15m-20m customers. Supporting twice that number is not simply a case of putting twice as much equipment into the datacentre and hoping for the best. Whether an application will scale to the necessary size is highly unlikely. Load testing can be used to identify the maximum capability of an existing piece of infrastructure, but to work out how much infrastructure you need for a given amount of work, you need to build a model.
So, we know it is a big challenge that Orange and T-Mobile face. In my experience the complete merger of all network and supporting systems will take 18months- 2years. So how will Vodafone and O2 respond? Well. They have a 2 year window of opportunity. After that, the teething problems will have been resolved and the EverythingEverywhere brands will have the biggest network with the best coverage and, if they don't mess up in the mean time, the largest customer base.
A challenge for all concerned.