Carphone Warehouse mulls Tiscali bid, report claims

Carphone Warehouse is mulling a bid for Tiscali's UK broadband user base, according to a report. The Italian group is running for the exit from the low-margin consumer ISP market. A Times source confirmed CPW is considering swallowing Tiscali's two million-plus customers if they're on the block "at the right price". The six …

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical

Just when you think the service can't go any further down the toilet, someone comes along to prove you wrong.

Being the victim of a series of mergers (originally with Nildram) I hate to think what the next one may be.

Maybe Phorm getting into the ISP game?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic for Carphone Warehouse

Just think of all those extra subscriptions they will be getting, although it looks like they haven't put much thought into all that extra bandwidth. The TalkTalk network is already overstretched, download speeds drop to less than 60k a second during peak times, even if I haven't downloaded much for a couple of months.

Still, an extra few million Tiscali customers forced into Phorm's spyware should make the CPW coffers a little heavier.

[Bruno Girin]

Time to move?

Darn! First, Freedom 2 Surf was acquired by Pipex. Then Pipex was acquired by Tiscali. Now, we (f2s's customers) are being sold to CPW? Methinks I may ask for my MAC when this happens.

[Jess]

Talk talk

The experience of everyone I know with talk talk is that the service is very good (within the limitations of a budget service.) apart from the hideously long wait for the initial connection.

I hope acquiring Tiscali doesn't mess this up.

(Paris - why not?)

[Slaine]

ha ha ha

Frying pan, meet fire; ooh look, there's Mr BlackPot, I know he's a bit on the dingy side but at least he's stopped calling up that nice Mr Kettle and insulting him. At this rate there will be no internet traffic for Phorm to monitor.

[Ian Yates]

Anecdote

After failing to join Tiscali for three months (they've never said what was wrong, and they still owe me my connection fees) I eventually went for Talk Talk.

As stated by Jess, the connection time is loooooong (3 weeks) when you've no other means of getting the 'net at home, but the service has been top-notch other than that.

The AC was right about slow connections during peak times (weekday evenings and weekends), but it feels like an active throttle to me - literally goes from 250Kbps to 60Kbps within 5 minutes of 5pm during the week.

Other than that, I'm damned happy with it - especially for £17pm ;)

Shame the ISP game is collapsing, though. Feel like the mid-90s all over again

[Richard Grimwood]

My money is on Vodafone

They need this. They have to find a way to get a ton of bandwidth to lots of base stations cheaply if 3G at 7.2mps it to really take off everywhere. LLU kit in exchanges could feed the phone masts. Tiscali has a the right network that they could even put the GSM calls over DSL loops. It would save them a fortune. Also for feeding femto cells to cover little black spots or to offer mobile phone based hosted business pbx's.

But vodafone won't do it for those reasons they will do it for the triple play home phone,broadband,mobile to the combined user base.

[ElFatbob]

Thanks ElReg...

for the heads up.

I'll be watching this with interest and hopefully will be able to get out of my pipex contract as soon as this happens...

[Steve Evans]

Errr...

I'm really not sure what to make of this...

I think it must be good news, as Tiscali's service just couldn't get any worse!

[Raymondo B]

oh no...

Great! More CPW server chaos to look forward to as Tiscali customers join the TalkTalk/ AOL scrum for bandwidth!

[Martin Saunders]

A 3rd LLU network for CPW?

If the Tiscali userbase is bought, I'd assume the LLU network Tiscali is running would come with them. That would be the 3rd LLU network CPW would have in the UK, although Tiscali use the same DSLAM as CPW (Huawei) so I guess you could crash the two networks together. I wouldn't want to be the person responsible for that task though...

[Dan]

TV OK

I've been holding my breath (well ... you know) ever since Tiscali bought Homechoice ... expecting service to drop; but I've been pleasantly surprised. The visiting installation/repair service is still available; I've been given a new set top box and the quality of the TV has improved considerably (4OD, Sky 1 etc.) and download speeds have gone up. I was beginning to think they might be a serious contender for BT / Sky / Virgin - I wonder which of those three will buy this leg of the business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Been here before!!

Haven't we been here before, when Tiscali was trying to sell the company, and it finished in no-buyers.

If the UK part of the company is sold within the next few months, lets hope that the service improves and not cause further problems for the consumer. At present Tiscali have many dark corners in customer relations and service, and whoever takes the company over need to look into this, before final approval.

But at present, its a case of wait and see!!.

[Stephen Gray]

TT throttled

Only bittorents are throttled, FTP and HTTP are perfectly fine, I have run active tests, I get 7Mb downloading a file from a website, if i use FTP its the same. I used to get upto a 7Mb on my torrents now max is about 50kb, I work for Opal I know exactly what I'm talking about and yes they throttle my connection as well.