Reuters Article

This paragraph may be of interest:

"The triple play offer in the UK will be launched by the end of the year and will be immediately followed by the launch of the service in Italy and then in the other markets," Pompei said.

i wonder how meny customers will homechoice lose with tiscali being merged with them
after all tiscali has most of the worst rates from their customers and excustomers there are!
and im one of them

Perhaps homechoice's influence in the new company will be to improve customer care.

I know it seems unlikely but this might mean that things like ADSL2 might come more quickly... Can't decide whether to leg it while I can or make the most of my 4 months free backhander they gave me ...

i doubt homechoice are in a position to influence anything

Yeah - it's hardly a merger of equals. Homechoice will be taking 11.5% of Tiscali increasing to 20% if profit targets are meant.

Is that profit targets set for Homechoice though? Cos if they're planning on just carving up the business then that's not going to happen surely?

And after 3 years, Tiscali then has the right to buy out the Homechoice stake.

So, that's it. By the end of the year I suspect Homechoice will be rebranded as they roll out the service across the Tiscali network.
Last edited by dronkula : 12-08-2006 at 19:39

that's a no brainer. would have thought it was obvious... free or not free? hmmm... I assume you'd at least wait 4 months

On a good note for me personally though, Tiscali is the only LLU provider who's unbundled my exchange. Hopefully they'll convert all of their existing unbundled exchanges to offer a Homechoice service and not decide on only doing it to the ones they make the most money out of - cos I doubt my little corner of North Wales is their busiest exchange.

Surley both parties will combine their networks and porducts to supply more people with the VOD & IPTV offering?

a massive undertaking in my opinion, given that both are isp's and at the end of the day at the mercy of bt co operation

Anyone know how many BB customers Tiscali have? On one of the other threads someone said 1.2m - but that seems a lot to me.

It's easy for companies like Flextech and Sky to ignore 50,000 people and not offer their channels on Homechoice. They may be more eager to get their channels on Tiscali/Homechoice for 1,250,000 potential viewers though.

Nope 1.2 million is about right.

My first reaction is "Bo****ks".

On the other hand, does anyone think it will make it more likely that the service improvments (HD, more channels, better VOD offerings) that we're all pressing for will happen?

(And that's not a rhetorical question: I genuinely don't know!)

It is disappointing, having had bad experiences with them in the past I don't consider Tiscali to be a reputable company. Unfortunately if I want to get the TV channels on Homechoice I don't have any other options.

Thinking optimistically, surely this is going to involve some investment from Tiscali, and they won't want it to fail. So, presumably they'll try to improve what Homechoice does and make it widely available.

As long as it doesn't suddenly increase in price, deteriorate dramatically in quality or involve me having to phone them up to correct billing mistakes, I'll likely hang around and see what happens, although I could be tempted away by a "better" brand if there was one offering a comparable service down my road!

In the short term, it'll probably mean that everything they've been saying is 'coming soon' will have to be re-evaluated by Tiscali to see if they actually want to offer it.

In the long term, once Tiscali have decided if they want to offer it, they're more likely to have the money to finance the upgrades.

However, I suspect the money and people they've got now will spend the rest of the year planning the roll out of the Homechoice service across Tiscali's network. So, they wont be working on improvements for existing Homechoice customers.

On another note, it'll be interesting to see what happens in London at exchanges where both Tiscali and Homechoice have already installed their kit. From Tiscali's point of view, and to make it easier in the long term, it'll probably be better to shift all the Homechoice customers over onto the Tiscali network. This way, they wont end up having to dealing with 2 different networks.

However, as there's been quite a few horror stories about Tiscali moving their customers onto their own unbundled exchanges, they may take a more cautionary stance and go with the 'if it's not broke, don't fix it' method.

Therefore the four month free deal must have been offered to keep up their customer numbers for the proposed merger.

As previously discussed, nobody is expecting signiificant improvements in the short term. Those who got a four month free deal to stay with HC are unlikely to stay at the end of the offer period simply because Tiscali are on board.

But by then HC customers will be an insignificant minority amongst the tiscali BB fools

Has anybody got a good word to say about Tiscali BTW?

yup, exactly... no point paying for the sake of it

The whole point of LLU is that the ISP's control everything and are not dependant on BT, except for the wire that goes to your house.

If we are into guessing what will happen, I sugguest that Tiscali will attempt to convert their existing customers to switch to the Homechoice service and keep both networks for now. The reasoning would be that they can make far more profit from the triple play service. They could also upgrade ALL tiscali customers (in HC enabled exchanges, about 50% of Tiscali's) to the basic HC service, financing it by requiring the telephone service to be switched as well.
Obviously additional income from those upgrading to additional channels/Sky and PPV would be the profit.

As for the idea that Tiscali would put the HC customers on Tiscali's network, get real. How could it possibly be designed to handle the amount of data required and why would it have been? Look at Easynet, if it was possible why hasn't sky started selling the Sky-By-Wire service to Easynet customers?

Using HC 's network (as it was designed for) would also mean HDTV services could be delivered as (presumably) planned this autumn.

It makes sense to me. I mean, why did Tiscali merge with HC unless they were going to supply HC services to Tiscali customers and compete against cable and BT?

Ok, if they're going to supply HC services to Tiscali customers, then that'll mean that the Tiscali network should be able to handle those services.

So, it makes sense from a financial point of view for Tiscali to move the existing Homechoice customers over onto their own network to cut down on duplication of costs. Why pay BT twice the rent for their boxes in their exchanges when they can cut one set of boxes out?

I'm not suggestion they'll do it on Monday. But I bet someone somewhere in Tiscali is working on a way of doing it.

It shouldn't matter whose DSLAM is in the phone exchange, as long as the they're all connected to the same network, HC will be able to supply their services across to the current Tiscali customers?

I think the chap was referring to BT doing installation of equipment, backhauls, migrating customers from one platform to another.


I don't think that telephony would cover that kind of expense but definitely a lot of upsell involved.

I would also speculate that customers will be migrated onto a single network as soon as is feasible for the cost reductions.


Disagree, Tiscali's data network is multiple 10Gbit/s backbone and easily capable of handling the load, Homechoice's network was based around ATM maxing at 622Mbit/s per circuit, being migrated now to an all IP solution so it was mentioned.

Nonetheless Tiscali also have a number of local POPs, there should be no reason for bandwidth to be an issue. The full Homechoice programming selection not including VOD uses perhaps 200Mbit, not much these days at all.

The main upgrade Tiscali might require is in backhauls to exchanges, however regrades are a fairly simple exercise and where there are Tiscali and Homechoice MSANs in an exchange they could run both from a single backhaul, CoS taking care of reserving bandwidth for TV.

I imagine there are other reasons for Sky not releasing Sky by Wire over Easynet's network than bandwidth. You seriously overestimate the amount of bandwidth required for TV sir. Think how few channels Homechoice have, and that they only use maybe 2.5Mbit each, 2-300Mbit would be quite adequate for each group of exchanges, including VOD, and wouldn't place a noticeable strain on the multiple 10Gbit cores of networks such as Easynet and Tiscali.


Who knows what's going to happen now, think we can't take anything for granted as Homechoice no longer pull the strings and have to answer to Tiscali who in turn answer to shareholders.


Absolutely agree that they are looking to do triple play, however I think Homechoice's content is more important than their technology. Video over IP is a relatively trivial exercise now compared to how it used to be and neither you nor I know how Homechoice's proprietary solution scales.

That assumes that the Tiscali MSANs are capable of supporting IGMP properly, which they may not be.

A few other points which may cause issues but IGMP and multiple PVC per port support are the main ones.

Good points. Basically, it can be done, so we don't have to worry about the details. I don't think the cost will be outside Tiscali's reach, the STB's probably cost around $100.

However, I do hope they see the sense of upgrading the STB to include wifi and HD outputs, if not a HDD/PVR function.