ISP TalkTalk Finish Acquisition of 135,000 SSE Broadband Customers
Low cost ISP TalkTalk, which is home to around 4.2 million UK broadband customers, has today announced the completion of their deal with Ovo Energy to acquire the company’s 135,000 (approx.) SSE Phone & Broadband customers for an undisclosed sum. The move comes after last year’s rescue of Origin Broadband’s base (here).
Ovo originally acquired SSE’s household energy and broadband business for £500m in January 2020 (here) – a deal comprising £400m in cash and £100m in loan notes. But since then, most UK energy providers have been hit by a tsunami of problems due to the COVID-19 pandemic and surging energy prices. Ovo itself recently had to cut around a quarter of its UK workforce (1,700 staff) and is re-focusing on their core energy business.
As part of the agreement, SSE has also given permission to TalkTalk for their brand to be “used under licence” until April 2023 to support a smooth transition.
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Tristia Harrison, CEO of TalkTalk Group, said:
“We are delighted that we can finally welcome SSE Phone & Broadband customers and team to the TalkTalk Group. We are the country’s only scale affordable provider and are experts at providing connectivity to home energy customers, so we are confident our new customers and colleagues will find themselves at home with us.”
However, the attention is now likely to shift back to Virgin Media (VMO2), which was previously reported to have made a £3bn bid to acquire TalkTalk’s customers (here) in order to help support their future plans.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It’s starting to feel a lot like the 90’s when the cable TV companies started amalgamating and being bought out, leaving Telewest and NTL as the only major players
I’ve been with Sky Broadband since 2008 and I have never had bad service from them and although some of the smaller providers were cheaper at times, Sky always beat them when my contract needed renewed. If my provider kept being bought out and merging like this, I would just leave. It must confuse older, non tech-savvy people
I don’t you have much chance of Sky broadband being taken over by another provider, even if they are owned by a U.S company now. While sky is not on my hate list like Talk Talk, I would still try to avoid Sky if I can help it, another one where the customer services is a load of rubbish
As soon as OVO took over they hiked my energy bill despite me being in a locked contract
Those broadband customers dodged a bullet
Oh the poor people having to go onto Talk talk, I wonder how many of them will move very quickly when they realise they are with Talk Talk. That is one provider I would not go with even if someone paid me to do so.
and yet I’ve been with them from the outset of them taking over my AOL and have no issues.
If you’ve been with a company and had bad service then you are entitled to moan but it seems the norm to moan without having had personal experience.
Yet 4.2 million customers seem to disagree with you Adrian. For the billionth time, can you stop hijacking TT articles please?
Excellent, great to hear you wouldn’t use them, means there’s more bandwidth for the rest of us! Personally I can’t fault them. On their 500Mb package, never skipped a beat! It’s also truly unlimited having downloaded over 20TB of data in a week before now after my PC was hit by ransomware meaning I had to download my backed up data. No complaints or throttling from TalkTalk whatsoever!
This acquisition materialised solely to satisfy the conditions of a massive volume commitment offer, targets needed to be met for them to secure tens of millions in discount from Openreach