BRUSSELS, March 6 (Reuters) - Vodafone and Telecom
Italia (TIM) on Friday secured conditional EU
antitrust approval to create Europe's biggest mobile towers
company, part of a strategy to roll out lucrative 5G services.
The European Commission said Vodafone and Tim will make
available to rivals 4,000 towers in cities with more than 35,000
people as part of concessions to address competition concerns,
confirming a Reuters report on Thursday.
Under the deal announced in July last year, Vodafone will
transfer its Italian mobile masts to INWIT, which is
60% owned by TIM.
The Commission, the bloc's executive, said the companies
also offered to scale back their active network sharing deal
after an initial probe.
The telecoms industry sees deals such as combining towers or
sharing networks as a way to reduce debt and share costs, as
well as a way of getting around EU antitrust regulators'
reluctance to clear mergers that reduce the number of players in
a market.
(Reporting by Marine Strauss @StraussMarine, Editing by Foo Yun
Chee)