UK ISP Namesco Sells Broadband Customers to The Phone Co-Op

Internet provider The Phone Co-op, an independent consumer co-operative, has this week announced the acquisition of Namesco’s broadband service, which was agreed on 31st May 2014 and has forced more than 2,400 of Namesco’s residential and business customers to migrate onto the new owners network.

Some readers may recall that Namesco use to run quite a popular home and business broadband (ADSL) service, although this was slowly pushed into the background after the company was gobbled up in a £24.5m acquisition by Spanish web-hosting firm Dada during 2007 (here). Since then existing customers have continued to be supported but Namesco no longer sells the service.

Vivian Woodell, CEO of The Phone Co-op, said:

“We are delighted to welcome these new customers to The Phone Co-op. We are confident that our customer-focused approach, which stems from the fact that The Phone Co-op belongs to its customers, will appeal to the people who are moving to us. All our customers have the opportunity to become members of The Phone Co-op, to co-own the business and share in the profits, and we hope that as many as possible of these new customers will choose to do so.

We offer a range of services in addition to broadband, including fixed line and mobile telephone services and a number of business connectivity services, and will be making these available to our new customers right away.”

Stephen Ewart, Commercial Director of Namesco, added:

“We’ve decided to focus on our core product ranges which include web hosting, domain names, email and website building tools. We’d like to say a big thank you to our customers who have bought broadband services from us over the years. This move to The Phone Co-op will be beneficial as customers will now be with a specialist provider offering improved products and a wider range of phone and broadband services.

We spent a lot of time with The Phone Co-op’s management and were impressed with their values and approach. We couldn’t have found a better home for our customers and trust this initial agreement will open up more opportunities to work together in the future.”

Ordinarily we’d look at the pros and cons of a move like this but in Namesco’s case their broadband packages have been stagnated for so long that the acquisition is unlikely to have many negatives, in fact it’s arguably a long overdue move. Customers should benefit from cheaper and faster broadband packages (ADSL2+ instead of ADSL etc.), not to mention phone services.