Broadband News

Tiscali tops 1.8m broadband users

Tiscali tops 1.8m broadband users

Garnet Roach garnet@consumerchoices.co.uk

The Italian telecoms giant, which is currently up for sale in the UK, now has 1,875,000 broadband users in the UK according to its latest quarterly results released this week (14-05-08).

A number of high profile bidders reported to be interested in Tiscali's (www.Tiscali.co.uk) UK arm have been identified, including BT (www.BT.com), Sky (www.Sky.com), Vodafone (www.Vodafone.co.uk) and Carphone Warehouse, owner of AOL (www.AOL.co.uk) and “free broadband” provider TalkTalk (www.TalkTalk.co.uk).

According to a statement released with its financial results this week, Tiscali’s board of directors “has defined a shortlist” to get the best deal through in the shortest time.

Earlier this week Carphone Warehouse was reported to have been excluded from the race to buy up one of its “big six” rivals, but yesterday issued a statement saying: “We have not heard anything from Tiscali, so as far as we are concerned we are still in the game.”

Tiscali has a generally consistent UK market share of around 12 per cent but “dual play” services and local loop unbundled allowed the company to increase revenue by 55 per cent on the same quarter last year.

At the end of March 2008 Tiscali had unbundled 850 local exchanges - or 55 per cent of its lines - and around 830,000 customers were bundling more than one service from the provider.

Michael Phillips, BroadbandChoices.co.uk product director, said: “The broadband market has become increasingly saturated and this may well be the last opportunity for competing ISPs to really get ahead in the game and grab a significant portion of the UK’s customer base.

“With just under two million UK customers Tiscali is the fourth largest ISP after BT, Virgin Media (www.VirginMedia.com) and Carphone Warehouse, and has become the last major broadband land-grab.”

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