Been There?
It's funny how in 2013 the bean counters at Telefonica thought that selling their UK fixed line broadband business (aka Be Unlimited) to Sky for £180 million was such a good idea.
The O2/Be ADSL2+ service was great, particularly if you were an O2 subscriber as you received a discount - decent download speed, Annex M (2.5Mbps upload), great reliability, excellent customer support (Be Unlimited handled the service and support).
Then it was sold to Sky for chump change, Annex M ended immediately, the speeds dropped overnight and reliability became a repeating issue. They employed the Be Unlimited customer support people but you could tell from talking to them that they knew it was now a total shit show.
Eventually I could stand it now more and moved broadband (and O2 mobile) to BT who were better than Sky, but not as good as Be There. Funnily enough I'm now with Hyperoptic 1Gbps which is run by old Be Unlimited people, so I've come full circle (and 3 for mobile). Both have been excellent.
Anyway that was the end of the O2 triple play, for chump change. And now they're having to get into bed with Virgin Media, which has a very limited network (if you're not covered by Virgin already, you never will be) which limits their future potential. With the debt that both Telfonica and Liberty Global have it's difficult to see where the investment will come from.
Oh what could have been for O2, if Telefonica weren't such utter fsckwits. I really don't see this merger ending well, assuming it goes ahead at all.