Carphone Warehouse buying AOL's UK internet-access business for £370m

[Bob Crabtree]

Carphone Warehouse is buying the AOL UK internet-access business from Time Warner for £370 million.

The acquisition follows Carphone Warehouse's April unveiling of free broadband for customers of its TalkTalk phone services, a move that's claimed to have resulted in 625,000 applications over the last six months.

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[Funkstar]

I thought this was really odd when i heard it on the news yesterday. Not the fact that TalkTalk/CPW are splashing the cash, but that AOL would sell AOL UK.

From what i've read about the way AOLs network is set up, they are going to need to do a lot of infrastructure work to disconnect from the US. At least it is my understanding that all the AOL traffic it funneled through the US first. Of course that could be well out of date now.

It appears AOL is trying to get out of the ISP business in Europe and concentrating on content and advertising. Will AOL UK still be sold as AOL, or will it all migrate to TalkTalk? or something new?

[Bob Crabtree]

Originally Posted by Funkstar

I thought this was really odd when i heard it on the news yesterday. Not the fact that TalkTalk/CPW are splashing the cash, but that AOL would sell AOL UK.

From what i've read about the way AOLs network is set up, they are going to need to do a lot of infrastructure work to disconnect from the US. At least it is my understanding that all the AOL traffic it funneled through the US first. Of course that could be well out of date now.

It appears AOL is trying to get out of the ISP business in Europe and concentrating on content and advertising. Will AOL UK still be sold as AOL, or will it all migrate to TalkTalk? or something new?

Know that Time Warner has already flogged off some other bits of AOL Europe (Germany and France, I think).

Some sites are saying that Carphone Warehouse will be able to keep the AOL name - and will do so - and that would make sense to a buyer since it's still a very strong brand, despite its fairly rapid loss of accounts worldwide.

[Funkstar]

I didn't realise Germany and France were already gone

[Rack]

If they changed AOL to Talk-Talk they would have to convert all the AOL customers from paying to free... not smart business. Maybe they'll start to introduce tarrifs for new customers for TalkTalk at some point, then start to migrate AOL ADSL.

[SpawnofSonic]

For carphone warehouse using the aol name would be a good thing as it does still carry some weight for a lot of consumers, i would like to see what happens with its talk talk brand