Brussels, 26/04/2006 (Agence Europe) - In the light of commitments by the merging parties to divest UMTS frequencies and mobile telephony sites of tele.ring to operators with lower market shares than T-Mobile Austria, the European Commission has cleared the planned acquisition of Austrian mobile phone company tele.ring by T-Mobile Austria. The Commission found that the proposed acquisition of tele.ring by T-Mobile, in its original form, would have removed from the Austrian mobile telephony market the operator which has offered consumers the most advantageous prices in recent years. T-Mobile will sell two 5 MHz 3G/UMTS frequency blocks, which are currently licensed to tele.ring, to competitors with smaller market shares, subject to approval by the Austrian telecommunications regulator and the Commission. At least one frequency package will go to Hutchison 3G (a framework agreement has been signed between T-Mobile and H3G). These commitments should, in particular, enable Hutchison 3G, which recently entered the market as a UMTS operator, to expand its network all over Austria and hence compete without being dependent on its current national roaming agreement with Mobilkom. The Commission found that Hutchison 3G has sufficient incentives to continuously offer low tariffs in order to gain additional customers and thereby increase its network utilisation and realise economies of scale, explains a press release.