UK ISP Sky Business Sniff Possible Acquisition of TalkTalk B2B Division
A new report claims that Sky Broadband’s business division, Sky Business (formerly Sky Connect), has joined Daisy Group and a couple of other interested parties in potentially gobbling up TalkTalk’s business-to-business arm (TT Business Direct Limited) within the next month or two, which is predicted to attract a value of around £150m.
In case anybody has missed the recent reports (here and here), broadband ISP TalkTalk – under growing pressure from its own debts, competition, rising costs and limited growth in its residential business – has decided to break the business up and sell some bits of it off in pieces to help balance the books.
The first bit to go will be their B2B Direct business arm, which is home to around 80,000 customers. The wholesale division may well follow. According to The Times (paywall), the latest party to enter the fray with a serious interest is allegedly Sky Business. Sky has recently been putting more time and money into growing their business base, thus such an acquisition would make sense.
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Advisers from Houlihan Lokey are said to be handling the sale and, if the recent update from Fitch Ratings is to be believed, then we could learn the outcome of all this within the next couple of months. All of this follows last year’s seemingly failed attempt to agree a £3bn sale to Virgin Media (VMO2), which is believed to have been scuppered due to the potential for regulators to raise competition concerns (here).
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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Does this include the customers who are on TTB resold products from Pulse8, Cuckoo etc? If so, will this change the business model of these companies?
No, this is TalkTalk’s B2B sales unit. The backhaul network and reseller products are under TalkTalk Wholesale.
If the purchase by Sky goes ahead, it’ll mean even more bad news for Cityfibre as Sky will use the BT Openreach network not the CF network.
I heard Sky was considering bringing altnets on to its network but plans were shelved to protect their business from the shape of the economy. So I’m not sure about this article. Sky also need to onboard a number of OFNL customers too. Unless they want to kickstart altnets again with this acquisition.
I was having a peek round a few fibre providers in Ireland, and Sky were listed as partners. Could they be trying to onboard altnets onto their network in Ireland first?
Why? This is b2b not retail
I heard Sky was considering bringing altnets on to its network but plans were shelved to protect their business from the shape of the economy. So I’m not sure about this article. Sky also need to onboard a number of OFNL customers too. Unless are looking to kickstart altnets again with this acquisition which would be interesting.
I was having a peek round a few fibre providers in Ireland, and Sky were listed as partners. Could they be trying to onboard altnets onto their network in Ireland first?
Sky have done their own FTTP in the past but abandoned partway through, like in Basingstoke and bits of Derbyshire.
I suspect the altnets Sky will join will be places where Openreach doesn’t serve.
Did you actually read the article Clive?