The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has cleared the potential £12.5 billion sale of EE to BT. A provisional decision was announced in October last year.

It means that the BT/EE merger is now likely to be completed on 29th January.

EE is reported to be discontinuing its Orange and T-Mobile tariffs for new connections and upgrades, according to Mobile News.

Although existing customers can continue with their Orange and T-Mobile deals, they’ll now need to move to an EE tariff if they want to upgrade.

Last year AT&T, T‑Mobile and Verizon rolled out their Isis mobile payment service across the USA.

However, recent international news headlines have used the acronym ISIS to refer to a group of fighters in Syria and Iraq.

Ofcom has published the volume of complaints made against mobile phone network operators, fixed-line phone providers, broadband companies and pay TV services between January and March 2014.

It’s the regulator’s thirteenth quarterly report of complaint data.

Last week, Orange UK closed its online shop, online customer service and online account management, moving them all to the EE web site.

You might say the future is starting to look less bright for the Orange brand in the UK.

Mark Windle, head of marketing at OpenCloud, predicts that this year’s reduction in the number of traditional telecoms operators in some countries will provide an opportunity for other operators to innovate and capture market share in 2016.

He says next year will be a year of rapid change for telecoms… whether it’s MVNO disruption, competitive tariff pricing or simply defence from the ‘dark art’ of hacking.

Mark Bridge writes:

The most memorable moments in life often go unrecorded. You don't have your camera in your hands. Your finger is still hovering over the 'pause' button on your audio recorder. Or you were simply too busy experiencing whatever was happening. It's all about the one that got away.

That's where Kapture can help.

Mark Bridge writes:

James Rosewell shows me a colourful roll of paper that's the width of an iPhone but well over three metres long. When I look closer, I can see it's a printed copy of the Wall Street Journal's mobile website. That's a lot of scrolling to do... and a pretty unfriendly user experience for anyone reading the news online. Why does it work so badly?

We're celebrating the seventh anniversary of The Fonecast this month with a handful of our favourite interviews from the early years.

You'll hear Ben Whitaker from Masabi, Truphone co-founder James Tagg, former Olympic athlete Steve Backley OBE and online banking pioneer Steve Townend.

This week's podcast begins with a report about a delay - or perhaps even cancellation - for the UK launch of HTC's Facebook phone, the HTC First.

We then move on to Vodafone's results, an Android app scare for Sky, Samsung's successes, contactless payments, potentially life-saving QR codes and an uncomfortable story about a smuggled mobile phone.

We start this week's podcast by talking about Yahoo and Tumblr before moving on to discuss Google's recent developer conference.

There are product announcements from BlackBerry, HP and the former MeeGo developers at Jolla... and there's some interesting mobile app news as well.

Three new smartphones launched at three separate events. Yes, Nokia has definitely been busy in the past few days.

As well as talking about Finland's finest phones, we also discuss recent claims made about EE, annual results from Sony, smart metering, 5G technology, virus protection, Vodafone and the worldwide growth of mobile phones.

We start today's programme with the promise of a faster roll-out for the UK's mobile broadband services.

Next on the agenda is tablet sales... followed by mobile security, mobile boarding passes, quarterly results, acquisitions, advertising and management succession.