[Gryphone]

I haven't written anything in this forum before, but I suppose I can contribute something useful now:

Freemove has existend since 2004 (see Teltarif, in German), when founded it included T-Mobile, Telefonica, Orange and TIM.

Earlier this year Telefonica left the alliance to ease the takeover of O2, had they stayed, three of the four UK GSM networks would have belonged to Freemove (see Teltarif). Personally I suspect, that Telefonica didn't really mind leaving Freemove, after all they were they already had a network (Eurotel, now O2-CZ) belonging to Starmap and are now the single most largest company within Starmap.

Until early 2006 Freemove had a deficit in northern Europe (no network in Scandinavia or the Baltic States), this changed when TeliaSonera was admitted into the alliance in March 2006 (see Cellular News.

In the near future Amena (soon to be rebranded to Orange ES) will join Freemove (see Cellular News).

A main difference between Freemove and Starmap (or VF+Partners) is that in some countries there is more than one network belonging to it, i.e. in the UK and the Netherlands both T-Mobile and Orange operate their seperate networks