20 Mar 2012Talk Talk

As of March 2010, Talk Talk is operating on its own as an independent company, having successfully completed its demerger from Carphone Warehouse. The TalkTalk Telecom Group PLC was formed as a result of this, marketing to residential customers under the “TalkTalk” and “AOL” brands and to business customers principally under the “TalkTalk Business” brand. The third arm of the group is TalkTalk Technology which operates two interconnected networks: a traditional legacy voice network and a Next Generation Network (“NGN”). TalkTalk reportedly holds 21% market share in the UK in terms of customers.

On 13 January 2011, TalkTalk launched its fibre optic broadband service offering speeds up to 40 Mbps. However, the service is available only as a boost to customers subscribing to either Essentials or Plus broadband packages. The coverage of the service is also limited to a certain number of homes. As a next step, the company is looking at offering quadruple bundles based on fibre broadband.

On 12 April 2011, TalkTalk Group announced the acquisition of Executel limited for an undisclosed amount. The acquired company will be merged with TalkTalk Business and is expected to add GBP 6.5 million to the company revenues.

As of 31 March 2011, Talk Talk has unbundled 86% of its broadband base. The operator plans to unbundle enough exchanges for 93% population coverage. Moving customers to a fully unbundled network will lead to an increase in ARPU for the operator.