Both O2 (Telefonica) and Vodafone have just agreed to a major new UK network sharing deal, which will also apply to their infrastructure in Germany, Spain, Ireland and eventually the Czech Republic too. The deal follows rumours of such a move earlier this month (here) and should deliver cost savings worth hundreds of millions of pounds over the next decade.

The deal isn't just about the basic act of saving cash though (removing unnecessary duplicate base stations), in fact it could also lead to overall network coverage improvements as the best parts of both networks would be retained. This could improve their service, including the quality of Mobile Broadband coverage.

However capacity and traffic would continue to be independently managed between the two operators, so don't expect congestion on one to be automatically solved on the other.