O2 (UK) they can do it too" in reference to Vodafone and EE, O2's biggest competitors and the UK's top three mobile-telecoms companies. O2 (UK) Telefónica UK Limited (trading as O2 – stylised as O) is a telecommunications services provider in the United Kingdom, owned by the Spanish multinational Telefónica, and is headquartered in Slough. With 25 million subscribers (as of December 2017), O2 is the second-largest mobile network operator in the United Kingdom after EE, with Vodafone in third place. O2 was formed in 1985 as Cellnet, a 60:40 joint venture between BT Group and Securicor. In 1999, BT Group acquired
State monopoly State monopoly In economics, a government monopoly (or public monopoly) is a form of coercive monopoly in which a government agency or government corporation is the sole provider of a particular good or service and competition is prohibited by law. It is a monopoly created by the government. It is usually distinguished from a government-granted monopoly, where the government grants a monopoly to a private individual or company. A government monopoly may be run by any level of government - national, regional, local; for levels below the national, it is a local monopoly. The term state monopoly usually means a