Carphone Wares buys Onetel and Tele2

Yesterday Carphone Warehouse (CPW) agreed a deal with Centrica to purchase Onetel, they also bought the business (UK and Ireland) of Tele2.

This gives CPW around 2.4m carrier pre-select (CPS) customers making them the 3rd largest residential voice carrier in the UK (BT is largest with about 15m, followed by NTL with about 4m).

The acquisitions makes senses considering the CPW are moving into the Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) market which is all about economies of scale and having large ammounts of customers per unbundled exchange. Having a greater number of customers means that there are more likely to be some on any given exchange. CPW have stated they want to go into 1,000 exchanges in the UK.

CPW will offer combined broadband, voice and mobile which should allow them to be very competetive and in future if they can find a content provider they'll be sure to offer a broadband TV service too.

Centrica will continue to push CPW (TalkTalk) services to their own customers for 3 years.

The big losers in this are BT who gain to lose even more residential customers to TalkTalk, and probably business customers too as TalkTalk Business is now being offered.

However it's also the current providers of services to Onetel and Tele2 as CPW migrate all their services on to their own infrastructure.