Mobile Stew

The BBC claims that Carphonewarehouse is planning on offering free broadband access in the UK to users of its land line Talk Talk service.

This would be quite an interesting approach.  I don't imagine it will be a very fast service if it does appear, and it could cause quite a stir in the market.  I think other operators want to position broadband access as the premium product, not the giveaway.

More: BBC NEWS

ntl:Telewest have finally reached agreement with Virgin Mobile over the
terms of a takeover offer, which values the mobile operator at £962.4m
($1.62bn), together with an agreement to re-brand all consumer operations with the Virgin brand in the future.  The combined company will have revenues of over £3.9bn which will put it on a par with Sky and Vodafone UK.

The new company, Virgin Broadband(??) will be the first company in the UK to offer quadruple play to customers - Broadband, TV, fixed and mobile telephony.  I really think that fourplay combined with the Virgin brand will reshape the way consumers think about communications and entertainment.  Telewest had great success with its tripleplay (TV, broadband and mobile) '3 for £30' campaign.  Imagine how successful a strong fourplay offer will be, ...

High-speed broadband provider Be has secured a £24.5m investment thatwill enable it to begin a nationwide installation of ADSL2+ services ofup to 22Mbps.

So far, the ISP has enabled or begun enabling 52 exchanges inLondon and will soon begin moving its kit into Birmingham andManchester. It aims to cover 50 per cent of the population by the endof 2006.

I know I'm slightly biased, but I'm unable to get excited about ADSL2+ as the high speeds that it will offer will only be available to the lucky few who live within  2-3km of an exchange - the further away you are, the slower the po

Broadband Genie which is the best site for keeping up to date with the latest and cheapest broadband deals has started a blog which is starting to take shape. 

I think the broadband market in 2006 is increasingly going to become a switching market as new customer growth starts to trail off, so sites like broadband genie should be well positioned to assist punters.

One of my old colleagues and mates has just dropped me a line to say that he has relaunched his Broadband Genie service, which will find the cheapest Broadband Deal based on where you live.  The service will also filter results to show the fastest or most popular services, or even those that don't require a minimum contract.  There is also some very useful information on how to switch providers easily. 

To check out the service visit broadbandgenie.co.uk

As expected Virgin Mobile have rejected ntl's offer as too low, despite majority shareholder Richard Branson backing the deal.  Richard Branson said that he was 90% certain that the deal will get done.

I really hope so.  As an employee of one of the cable companies I can't tell you how excited this potential deal has made me, particularly as it would hopefully give me an official reason to dabble in mobile content and services again and also the opportunity to work for a fun company again.

I guess I'll just have to wait and see if ntl stump up the extra cash - suggestions are that the shortfall is only, yes only, £25m. 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Yesterday's rumours that Ntl would be making a move for Virgin Mobile proved to be true with Ntl making an official offer worth £800m for Virgin Mobile.

If the deal goes ahead Ntl will use the Virgin brand to offer internet access, TV and fixed line and mobile telephony.  Ntl said it had also held preliminary discussions withT-Mobile, Virgin Mobile's network provider, which has said it supportsany proposed deal.

No response has been made by Virgin Mobile and I have a sneaky feeling the initial offer of 323p per Share will be rejected.  Early trading also seems to support this with Virgin Mobile shares rising to 337.25p in the first few minutes of trading today,suggesting that the City also believes a higher bid - or a rival ...

Phew it's been a very hectic week.  The new site design is finished (although I bet I won't be able to stop myself fiddling with it!) and I hope you like it.  I still need a bit of help customising My TagCloud so if there are any XML experts who can spare 10 mins can they drop me a line please.

I've got back into the habit of posting frequently, and I think it has shown with average visits jumping from 3-4K per day to close to 20K per day over the last couple of days!  This is mainly due to my post 10 Simple Ways to Speed Up Windows XP getting picked up by del.icio.us, digg and many other smaller sites.

Despite only 300K Xbox360s being allocated to Europe...

The Telegraph features a story today, which if true, will really shake up the UK market.  It reports that NTL/Telewest, who are currently in the midst of a merger, are due to announce tomorrow another merger with Virgin Mobile creating an entertainment and communications giant worth £4.5bn and with more than 9m customers.  More importantly this would create the UK's first Four-Play company offering Voice, Video, Data and Wireless.