| Posted: Thursday 8th June 2006 by
Sam |
The rumour mill has been working overtime for the last 12 hours since ZDNet published an article claiming that Bulldog were leaving the retail market and were instead going to resume offering wholesale products again. This morning Cable & Wireless, Bulldog's parent company, has confirmed the story in their announcement.
In summary, from 1st July 2006 Bulldog will:
- Offer wholeasle LLU services to other ISP's. They did offer this previously, but pulled this service nearly two years ago.
- Stop selling and marketing their retail products completely. This includes their 512Kbps services right up to their new 16Mbps services.
- Reduce headcount in sales and marketing by around 150. Headcount in customer services will remain unaffected.
- Continue supporting and billing for existing residential and business customers
This news will come as no suprise to many, as Bulldog have become a considerable financial burden on their parent, having made of loss of over £100m on revenues of £33m for the year ending March 2006. It is certainly sad to see this news, as Bulldog have historically always been towards the front of the pack when offering new high speed and innovative services. Despite their well documented problems late last summer, the general opinion on the various forums seems to put Bulldog in good light recently. However, we should soon start seeing ISP's begin to offer resold Bulldog services at up to 16Mbps. These ISP's will no doubt provide their own special offers and perhaps provide more extras too.
Bulldog's LLU coverage far exceeds any other providers footprint right now, with 534 exchanges enabled and a 800 planned in total by autumn. Cable & Wireless have tried to make it very clear that they are committed to offering LLU services to corporates, and their rollout of some 120 exchanges since the end of March seems to support this.
The full announcement from Cable & Wireless is available here.
Update (11:00am): From the investor and analyst conference call this morning, it has become apparent that Bulldog will initially wholesale their fully unbundled double-play (voice and broadband) service to ISP's only. They will apparently look at offering a broadband-only product in the future, but it requires modifications to their equipment in the exchange. |