Over the weekend, we covered that the Financial Times was reporting that Openreach was considering suspending provisioning new services to TalkTalk due to unpaid bills (which have since been paid). TalkTalk has been struggling for some time, but has restructured its debts. TalkTalk’s account with Affiliate Window (Awin) has been suspended.
The Telegraph quite surprisingly reported last night that BT Group is considering a bid for TalkTalk (subscription required) as the losses it is incurring are affecting the Openreach wholesale division, with TalkTalk losing over 250,000 customers in the first three months of this year.
Worried about your TalkTalk service? — We don’t think consumers are likely to be imminently affected by this, and although this can’t be ruled out, this is by far the greatest asset of the business. Even Openreach’s original suspension would have affected new services, and the bill was reportedly paid quickly thereafter.
A bid by BT Group for a major player such as TalkTalk may not go down well with regulators due to their strong market position.
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It would make sense for BT or EE to buy them. As for competition, with the rise of all these little altnets here and there, would the CMA or OFCOM stand in the way considering Talktalk is likely one of those business now considered “too big to fail”? With 3 million customers, there aren’t really many companies that could handle a sudden influx.
Would BT be allowed to take it over? After all, they are already huge.
Indeed. This would raise concerns I’m sure, but then there are probably not going to be huge numbers of candidates who want to capture that market.
We were wondering internally if Cuckoo (part of Octopus group) might be able to do it. Would be huge influx in terms of customers for an ISP but Octopus does have quite a sizeable business in terms of customers on the utility side, and they have the Kraken platform TalkTalk adopted earlier this year.
As I’ve posted in ‘ISP unhappyness’, TT customer service seems to have gotten even worse, something is very wrong there.
If BT takes over TalkTalk then I shall waste no time finding another provider