To help answer his news editors questions around what the merger means for shoppers, mister Cellan-Jones used Mediacells as his only named analyst source to highlight the potential upside of the joint venture from a consumer perspective.

"In other words, will mobile phone customers be better or worse off, once they can only choose from four operators rather than five?" he writes in his Dot Life blog, September 8, 2009.

He continues:

"In chimed an analyst, with thoughts about the level of competition in the UK as desperate operators tried to lure the shoppers with ever more complex offers. 'The UK market had an unbelievable 500 (sic*) new deals activated in June,' Brad Rees of Mediacells told me. His argument was that if the merger reduced this "tsunami" of offers it might actually be easier for customers to get to grips with the market."