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BT Gobbles UK #5, Orange/FT
Saturday, 17 April 2010 14:12
And_Then_There_Were_None840,000 customers aren't enough to sustain a DSL provider in Britain, France Telecom has decided, and has abandoned to BT a network connecting 65% of the population.They instead will resell BT's network. The previous #5, Tiscali UK, was swallowed by TalkTalk last year. Except for O2/Be, there isn't an ISP in Britain even 5% of the size of the smallest of the Big 4.s
Japan, Korea, and even France have also seen declining competition. In Japan, prices have gone up dramatically as NTT fiber has come to dominate.and  Korean prices often look like a cartel. Telecom, as Ivan Seidenberg taught me, is a business of scale. Losing Orange, Tiscali, AOL and others means that OFCOM can't blindly assume competition will solve most problems, including net neutrality.
Orange after the T-Mobile merger is the largest mobile carrier in Britain with over 30M customers; if they can't make it, no one else is likely to become more than a very small niche player.
In 2000, FT was the largest ISP in Britain after buying Freeserve for £1.63 billion. It's been downhill from there, including a loss of over 100,000 broadband subscribers in 2009. FT spent hundreds of millions building their network, but it would have taken hundreds of millions more to match TalkTalk (80+% of the UK, dedicated backbone) and Sky. Sad. Current subscriber counts:
BT Retail (PlusNet, Brightview) 5,008,000
TalkTalk (Carphone Warehouse, AOL) 4,155,000
Virgin Media 4,103,500
Sky Broadband (BSkyB) 2,404,000
Orange (France Telecom) 840,000
(From ISP review)
BT five years ago reached over 99% of British homes, including Welsh highlands and Scottish islands. Only 15 of nearly 5600 exchanges don't have a DSLAM.  With DSLAMs as small as a large paperback and costing less than $1,000, there's no reason not to cover nearly all the exchanges in the world. The competitors cover a much smaller number of exchanges, although they reach 80+% of homes at unbundled exchanges.
TalkTalk 1,723
Be/O2/Telfonica 1,236
Orange 944
Cable & Wireless/Bulldog 802
Virgin's cable network reaches about half the U.K. population.
All eschange data from Samknows, a remarkable site with data of virtually every provider at every exchange in Britain.
Competitors continue to disappear in Britain, echoing the consolidation in Korea, Japan, and France.
Last Updated on Monday, 19 April 2010 20:22