Firstly, Brightview PLC have announced that, subject to shareholder approval, they have been purchased by British Telecom for just short of £16m. This affects the three current and many legacy brands run by Brightview, including Waitrose.com, freenetname, Global Internet, madasafish, care4free, ic24 and dialstart. The full story is available on:
Next, PIPEX Broadband Ltd, part of PIPEX Communications PLC, have been sold to Tiscali UK Ltd for £210m. This affects the recent acquisitions of PIPEX as well, which includes (but is not necessarily limited to) Freedom2Surf, Homecall, Bulldog, Nildram & Toucan. The full story is available on:
Unfortunately, this accounts for every broadband provider that we have ever recommended in recent years and we find ourselves in the same boat, potentially looking for a new provider.
Why? Well, BT's infrastructure is solid enough, almost every broadband product being sold be a wholesale purchase from BT or using their backbone network somewhere. However, their support is off-shored, if not out-sourced, and it is the experience of some of our customers that use BT already, that the support is less than comprehensively trained.
As an example, a DreamGenius customer, paying 090 premium-rate call charges to trouble-shoot the failure of her BT Yahoo! software, installed from their CD-ROM, was instructed to "uninstall Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, because there is a known conflict". Well, we'd defy the majority of Windows users to effectively uninstall either application and still have a working computer! Sure, you can disable them, even make them disappear, but not uninstall.
Similarly, Tiscali has always been viewed as a provider on the fringes of the mainstream internet service provision market but never really figured in the minds of the average broadband buyer. As such, they are somewhat of an unknown quantity but, being a major European company, and having shelled out a lot of money for PIPEX, are now perhaps looking to be taken seriously.
Sadly, we have no experience and therefore have no substantiated opinion to offer. The market is consolidating and there isn't much more of it to do. Now, when you pays your money and you takes your choice, it's from a much slimmer menu.
