2005/06/20

France Telecom tipped for Cable & Wireless takeover - ZDNet UK News

France Telecom tipped for Cable & Wireless takeover - ZDNet UK News

Is this just the rumour factory on overdrive? C&W are a big organisation and integrating it with FT just to get Bulldog seems a bit of an overkill. Bulldog are one of the local loop unbundlers (LLU) in the UK and C&W paid £18m for them.

FT probably could pay the £4bn, but would they want to? C&W have a large legacy network, they do terminate lots of call minutes for various CPS operators but C&W have a reputation similar to BT i.e. a large telco that's a bit of a monolith.

FT already own Wanadoo (the ISP) and Orange (the mobile phone comany) and Wanadoo is migrating off Energis' network on to Orange's. Do FT want another huge network and company to run in the UK.

They could of course have plans to operate a rival network to beat BT's 21CN which could be an interesting move.

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