Tesco broadband goes TITSUP, world keeps turning on wobbly-wheeled trolley Tesco's broadband service went titsup this afternoon and remained out of action as The Register went to publication. The UK's largest supermarket chain agreed to offload its fixed line broadband customer base of around 75,000 subscribers to TalkTalk in January this year. The network is in the process of being transferred over …
In the grand scheme of things 75000 subscribes is very small, still I wouldn't mind them being transferred to a BT wholesale account. .. hold on I'm just filling in the paperwork. ..should be an isp in 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. Shitty reseller ISP with one member of support staff is GO !
On a more serious note. If you make £1 profit per subscriber a month that's serious wonga !
Demon has sent out emails saying that part of the functionality of broadband user accounts has been transferred to intY Limited and Namesco. Apparently they will bill separately for the services that were "free" as an integral part of Demon accounts.
It looks like Demon will still charge for the broadband connection. However an acccount's web space, domain name, and email services for bog-standard "myuser.demon.co.uk" will be transferred and in future not be "free".
They took my one year advance broadband subscription recently - so it's a bit off if there is now more to pay on top of that to retain my email address. Losing the fixed IP address and web space is not a problem for me - but others may depend on them as part of their Demon subscription.
There is a suggestion that these "free" services will be chargeable 60 days after April 1st at an as yet unspecified rate.
Having read their explanation several times I still can't work out what is happening or when.
http://help.demon.net/announcements/important-service-change-transfer-of-demon-web-hosting-domain-and-email-products-to-inty-limited/
Ha. Ironically. Tesco *was* my first ISP. I actually have good memories of tesco.net from when I signed up to The Internets back in '95, until I needed moar lolcats and upgraded my 56kb Sportster modem to a wall-mounted ISDN connection from BT. For all I know, my account might even still exist...
Ye olde Tesco Broadband (tesco.net) used to be NTL over BTw Datastream rebranded. They then moved supplier after Openreach came into being and Datastream started to be replaced by WBC (also NTL subcontracted its ADSL contracts out to Fujitsu).
Tesco then changed wholesale supplier, and are now kicking the whole shebang off to TalkTalk.
Although Aldi and Lidl have MVNOs in various places, they don't seem to do fixed line broadband.
Since they're both privately-held companies, they're not so much in thrall to the quarterly figures that they feel obliged to jump on every short-term revenue opportunity. I suspect that attaching your brand to a white-label broadband product has lots of potential for reputational damage and very little potential for long-term revenue of any consequence.
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