The X-Factor may have missed out on a Christmas number one this year, but TalkTalk believes the hit show it sponsored played a star role in it more than trebling analysts expectations for net new broadband customers in the last three months of 2009.
Figures out yesterday show that the ISP acquired 36,000 net new broadband [...]

The countdown for Phorm could well and truly be starting, revealing by the end of the year if it really is on track to live up to its hype and serve £239m worth of adverts within two years.

The man in charge of the UK’s biggest ISP says that, when it comes to preventing illegal file-sharing, too much attention is being paid to peer-to-peer networking and the role ISPs can play to stop it. Speaking ahead of the impending final Digital Britain report, Charles Dunstone said “we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.”

The deal is done. Carphone Warehouse has bought Tiscali’s UK assets for £235m which it claims makes TalkTalk the largest residential broadband provider in the UK with a combined subscriber base of 4.25m.
SamKnows queried TalkTalk’s maths, given that BT claims to have 4.6m subscribers. TalkTalk’s rationale, it explains, is that of these BT users 700,000 [...]

First they were, then they weren’t, then everyone thought they might be again but they weren’t but now, finally, Carphone Warehouse is being reported to have made an informal offer of £275m for Tiscali’s UK assets.
This is believed to be way below the price Tiscali had been seeking – it turned down an offer for [...]

While the talk of flat markets was hardly surprising, the biggest news to come out of Carphone Warehouse’s Q4 trading update, released this morning, was confirmation the group will split its retail and telecoms operations.
Analysts and investors have long called on the group to realise there was never much logic behind having a retailer and [...]

Carphone Warehouse is considering a last-minute bid for the UK broadband arm of ISP Tiscali. The company, which is on the verge of administration and has been suspended from the Italian stock exchange, was being wooed by BSkyB until the deal appeared to fall apart on pricing issues. However, the media behemoth has recently renewed [...]

A run of gloomy financial interim reports was brought to an end this week when Carphone Warehouse did not follow the trend in announcing job cuts but instead hinted at demerging its retail and teleco operations.
The move, which the City is known to favour, would see the two arms of the company parted because analysts [...]

Carphone Warehouse has confirmed to SamKnows it is no longer pursuing a purchase of Tiscali, leaving Sky as the sole suitor for the Anglo-Italian ISP that has been for sale throughout most of 2008.
Although Carphone Warehouse believes it will be ‘nip and tuck’ whether it will continue to occupy third place in the UK ISP [...]

Although the customer tracking advertising platform Phorm received a blow this week when it was publicly snubbed by Orange, it can take solace that Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse have assures Sam Knows they are keen to carry on evaluating the technology.
The advertising platform is no stranger to controversy. BT began a trial at the [...]

Carphone Warehouse is reported to still be in talks to buy Tiscali. The Italian-owned ISP had been hoping to set up an auction between Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse this summer but Vodafone pulled out of the process, believing Tiscali had valued itself too highly.
Tiscali is believed to still be talking to Sky about a possible [...]

Broadband is continuing to be the lead growth area for Virgin Media according to its second quarter figures which were released this morning with a reminder that the brand is gearing up to launch 50mb broadband later in the year.
The company added 54,600 net new broadband customers in the quarter, up from 45,800 for the [...]

After conceding to SamKnows that the property slump was having an impact on its broadband sales Carphone Warehouse has now roughly halved the number of new customers it expects to connect this year, from 400,000 to between 200,000 to 250,000.
However the latest figures from the group also revealed what it is admitting as ‘disruption’ causing [...]

The ice cold relationship between the music industry and the ISPs it expects to police the internet is showing signs of thawing, but only a little and only after the threat of government legislation.
The six leading ISPs have agreed to send out educational letters to subscribers the BPI believes have been downloading music illegally. BT, [...]

Carphone Warehouse believes a slowdown in broadband connections is down to the housing slump rather than an indication we have moved to a predominantly ’switcher’ market.
Shares in the group fell 10% yesterday as its Chief Executive Charles Dunstone admitted that so far this year new, net broadband customers were down on expectations. An assertion that [...]

Hot on the heels of last week’s news that Bulldog were cutting off all of their SDSL clients, it now seems that Bulldog is accepting no new customers at all.
Whilst the Bulldog website still speaks of its products on various pages, anyone attempting to buy any products or perform an availability check is redirected to [...]

Carphone’s targeted rollout of 1,000 exchanges just over a year ago has already been surpassed. No less than 1,134 exchanges have been unbundled now. What’s potentially even more interesting is that they are targetting a further 500 exchanges by March 2008 (see page 36 of CPW’s annual strategy day PDF). Also of interest in the [...]

If 2006 truly was the “year of LLU”, then it appears that someone forgot to tell Be* (O2), Easynet (Sky) and Carphone Warehouse (TalkTalk) that we’re now in 2007. All three companies have started 2007 with the same fervour as they finished 2006 with.

LLU deployment in the past 12 months
It was under three weeks ago [...]

I’ve added a couple of new LLU providers to the listings today – Lumison (a business ISP based operating in Scotland) and WB Internet. I’ve also updated the Carphone Warehouse / TalkTalk data en-mass, thanks to an update provided by the company themselves. In an effort to help out users of the site who are [...]

After undergoing months of trials and forming the basis of endless speculation, Bulldog have finally launched their ADSL2+ services. Touted at running at 16Mbps downstream, with 1Mbps upsteam, the service is available at all of Bulldog’s unbundled exchanges (according to Bulldog’s FAQ).
It’s still unclear as to whether Bulldog are capping the product at 16Mbps or [...]