It is always good to share. But recent communiqués of co-operation between mobile phone competitors make it sound as though they’ve dropped their arch-rivalry for the good of mankind. While Vodafone and Telefónica would like nothing better than to tear out each other’s throats in the marketplace, their new deal to share network infrastructure is a “milestone pan-European collaboration”.

It fits the well-worn template for such communications. Customers, the environment and the business will benefit. There’ll be fewer unnecessary and unsightly masts, better quality and coverage (note: nothing explicit about lower bills), and lower costs – “hundreds of millions of euros [of savings] for both companies over the next 10 years”. Yet the very vagueness of these benefits tells us how broad this agreement is. The top people have agreed to it, which bodes well. If the boss is shouting at you for a progress report, there’s a big incentive to make progress. But these deals are hard to get right. One exception in the UK is the 2007 agreement between Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 UK. But as smaller operators, they really had to get together. Vodafone and Telefónica’s deal casts a shadow over another Vodafone agreement – with France Telecom’s Orange UK – which was itself supposed to “deliver long-term benefits to customers” when unveiled two years ago.