AOL bought by TalkTalk owner

Carphone Warehouse has bought AOL's UK business, making it one of the country's biggest broadband providers.

The deal is worth £370m and is subject to approval by the European Union competition regulators.

AOL UK, previously owned by Time Warner, has 2.1m internet customers of which 1.5m are on broadband.

Carphone Warehouse has had more than 600,000 applications for its TalkTalk broadband service since it launched earlier this year. However the offer has recently received much negative publicity with customers facing lengthy delays to join the service.

As Web User reported recently, TalkTalk even admitted that it bungled the launch of the free broadband service.

But despite TalkTalk's problems, the Carphone Warehouse seemed keen to emphasise the positive implications of the deal.

Charles Dunstone, CEO of Carphone Warehouse, said: "The acquisition of AOL's UK internet access business is transformational for our broadband business. This deal gives us significant scale to complement the rapid organic growth of our free broadband proposition."

However, industry watchers aren't so sure. Chris Williams of price comparison and switching service uSwitch.com, said: "every integration has its teething problems and the fact is that Carphone is still trying to put its own house in order... over 200,000 customers are still waiting to be connected. Now that they have acquired a further 2 million new customers it’s our hope that it won’t be their customers who pay the price for their aggressive expansion plans.”

http://www.talktalk.co.uk/
http://www.aol.co.uk/

More news via RSS Post item to Del.icio.us Post item to Digg.com