While the European digital commissioner Neelie Kroes may want to ease the way for cellco mergers in the region, to support carriers with significant investment scale, national and EU antitrust regulators remain wary of anything that reduces the number of players in a country. One route for operators to appease the competition agencies is to offload some or all of their networks and spectrum to new players, an approach seen in France and now in Ireland. This is an option when mobile players are buying one another ‘ the type of bid which most worries antitrust bodies ‘ but is not, of course, open to wireline carriers acquiring mobile assets. Traditionally, these have often had an easier time of it…