Carphone Warehouse snaps up Tiscali: Good luck with that
Carphone Warehouse has bought the troubled Tiscali UK, making it the biggest residential broadband provider in the country
Carphone Warehouse has bought Tiscali's UK operation for a cool £236m, making it Britain's biggest residential broadband company.
Carphone already operates its own TalkTalk broadband brand, and also owns AOL UK. It was recently announced that it would split TalkTalk and the company's mobile business into two separate firms.
Tiscali held talks with BSkyB over a similar deal in March, which came to nothing. According to a BBC report, the troubled Italian firm is mired in around £535m of debt.
The deal is expected to be completed around the end of June, and until then Tiscali will continue to operate as a separate company. A spokesman for TalkTalk assured us that the 1.4 million existing Tiscali customers won't have to do anything, and their service and email addresses will continue to work. Carphone's main focus, however, is on the TalkTalk brand, so in future we may see the various broadband services consolidated under that banner.