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UPDATE AAISP UK Migrate O2 Wholesale Lines to TalkTalk After SKY Concern

Saturday, Aug 17th, 2013 (7:52 am) - Score 2,719

Business ISP Andrews and Arnold (AAISP) has confirmed that they’ve started moving “a lot of” BE/O2 Wholesale broadband lines over to their other back-haul carrier (TalkTalk Wholesale), which has primarily been caused by a loss of customers and related “uncertainty over the Sky take over“.

BSkyB (Sky Broadband) acquired O2 UK and sibling BE Broadband’s fixed line internet and phone customers for £180 million earlier this year (here) and related customers are soon due to be migrated over to Sky’s own unbundled (LLU) network. But the O2/BE Wholesale business, which supplies ISPs and corporate customers, was retained by O2 (note: the networks will still be integrated).

In other words O2 Wholesale effectively agreed to become a customer of Sky with a wholesale agreement in place so that they could continue to provide related services to partners as normal. Never the less AAISP reports that, following Sky’s acquisition, “many customers” began changing to their BT-based lines or left the ISP altogether.

The situation is perhaps a little reminiscent of our May 2013 article, which revealed that Sky’s customer support staff had been told to handle any objections to Rupert Murdoch (partial BSkyB owner / shareholder) with “sensitivity” (here). A number of O2 and BE’s customers are known to have left due to their singular dislike for all things Murdoch.

On top of that AAISP notes that the wholesale side of TalkTalk’s network, which is not to be confused with the services offered by their budget retail ISP, are both technically and commercially very similar to their BT-based platform (i.e. BE/O2 lines have more differences). AAISP also gain some financial benefit from having more lines on TalkTalk’s side.

AAISPs Statement

As customers will be well aware, the underlying BE/O2 network has been taken over by Sky. This has led to many customers changing to BT lines or leaving us altogether. Many others have expressed concerns over the change and the long term viability of the BE/O2 wholesale offering. We don’t have a crystal ball (well, we do, but nobody trained to use it), so we don’t know quite what will happen in the long term.

We now have TalkTalk as an additional back-haul carrier. They work technically and commercially in a very similar way to BT. This means we have a way to offer the reliability with multiple lines using BT and TT lines, allowing use of either at the same price and bonding lines efficiently.

We are therefore considering the radical step of moving most, if not all, BE lines to Talk Talk.

Customers are being emailed individually about the change but those on existing BE Lines shouldn’t worry as the price they pay won’t be affected by the move, although obviously new customers will no longer be able to take the same service.

The change itself should, in theory, only result in an outage that lasts a few minutes but faults are always a possibility. The new TalkTalk based lines work on the same settings and login details as the BE lines, so their “service carries on with no other changes” being needed.

Once all this is complete then customers will also be given an option to change tariff. Ideally AAISP would like to shift all of their BE Lines over but customers with a “very good reason” can make a special request to the ISP if they want to keep it; although this should perhaps only be considered a temporary solution (AAISP have said that they could eventually scrap BE).

Ironically we often find that almost as many people suffer from an arguably irrational fear of TalkTalk’s network as they do from Sky. But, once again, it’s very important to distinguish between the wholesale and retail sides of both networks.

UPDATE 20th August 2013

O2Wholesale has informed ISPreview.co.uk that, contrary to what some ISPs told us, they do not currently have a wholesale agreement with Sky.

Dan Cunliffe, Head of Partners and Strategy at O2 Wholesale, explained:

O2 Wholesale does not have a wholesale agreement with Sky and is continuing to deliver business as usual to its partners. There will be an announcement in due course regarding the way in which O2 Wholesale will deliver its services moving forward“.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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