Four years ago, the UK telecoms market was completely reshaped when incumbent telco BT acquired the country’s largest MNO, EE. That created a very powerful quad play operator with clear leadership in fixed and mobile services, and its own pay-TV offering too. At the same time, however, regulators blocked a bid by Hutchison and Telefónica to merge their respective UK MNOs, Three and O2. The grounds were that this would reduce the number of MNOs from four to three, whereas the BT transaction would not – so Three and O2 were left to compete separately against a significantly more powerful BT, and Telefónica was forced to stay in an overly competitive market it had clearly wanted to exit. If those rulings…