Vodafone and Orange are to share mast sites from this year as part of plans bid to improve UK mobile phone coverage and reduce operational costs.

Using each other's infrastructure will enable the two companies to decommission up to 15 per cent of existing masts within the first two years, which will affect almost 3000 sites in total.

Orange estimates it has 15.6 million active mobile customers in the UK, and Vodafone 17.9 million. The operators are keen to stress that each will remain responsible for the management, maintenance and quality of their own networks.