Ben's back in the Netherlands

[inquisitor]

Originally Posted by Ties Brants

It was pretty predictable that one of them would disapear. 5 was a little to much for a small country, even German only has 4.

It's especially the smaller and densly populated countries like NL, where it makes sense to run a 4th, 5th or even 6th network, because it's relatively cheap to roll-out a network, which further has a higher mean load and so amotizes faster.
In a territorial state like Germany you have to build up a lot of infrastructure to cover rural areas, where then only few users will generate few revenue. That's so expensive, that even after ten years of service O2 Germany still has a lot of gaps in their coverage map (see below), which are currently (nearly) closed by a national roaming agreement with T-Mobile (which is disabled in regions with sufficient O2 coverage).
Since O2 Germany and E-Plus, who both had only GSM1800-frequencies before, were granted EGSM900 frequencies in 2006, O2 aims to achieve nationwide coverage of their own network by end of 2009.