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Originally Posted by m419
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Originally Posted by Paul
Bulldog won't do that and C&W won't do it as it costs money and currently they aren't making much profit from Bulldog. They know that it will cost a lot of money to put right what they have messed up so far and by then they would have lost a lot of customers anyway.
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All they have to do is improve their sales and customer services/technical support and make the service seem reasonable, by manipulating consumers. If they offered free 16Meg broadband for those who choose the Top phone package,Bulldog lounge and calling features pack and also add 6p connection charge for all calls not included in an allowance bundle such as mobile calls. I'm sure they will be able to make some money to pay for the improvements and advertising. |
The problem is that Bulldog suddenly became massively successful, and the systems they had in place couldn't cope. They spent a couple of years trying to improve, but in the meantime, companies like Talk Talk came along and introduced incredibly cheap or free broadband. Wholesale and equipment prices haven't fallen as quickly as the price to the end consumer, so we end up with a situation that all Residential ISPs are making little or no profit.
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Remember, TalkTalk's free broadband is terrible as it is a 'Free service', there have also been many complaints about Carphone Warehouse services which include:
So when customers work this out, Bulldog,NTL,Telewest and AOL will be the companies left standing to take the custom, so it might not be worth Cable and Wireless selling up just yet! I think they should leave it for a year or two as I can a big disaster happening at Carphone Warehouse and BT's service is just extortionate for what you get!
AOL is also thinking of selling its UK customer base.
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Sadly, the Great British Public does not bother reading further than the word "Free". They do not bother to work things out.
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So I don't think any companies will be interested in taking over Bulldog anyway.
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AFAIK, Bulldog isn't for sale. The reason C&W have effectively pulled out of residential broadband (and the reason they pulled out of it before) is that it is not very profitable. It is far more profitable for them to sell their LLU lines wholesale to other ISPs (which is what they are doing), who can than take the loss thanks to tons of Venture capital.
Make no mistake, the market is collapsing, and I suspect you'll see a lot more residential ISPs pulling out of the market or closing before the market is restored to health again.
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A sneaky way of Bulldog getting out of the bad part is for them to do a total rebrand which is not going to cost to much money. A simple and cost effective way is for them to rebrand into 'Cable and Wireless Residential' or even dig out old names and brands such as Mercury. Then they could buy out AOL UK,then they could launch a virtual mobile network service raking in the cash, once they make money, they could offer ADSL TV services similar to homechoice and Cable and Wireless would be offering a quad service!
They could even purchase Homechoice as I believe thats up for sale and don't think a merge will happen with Tiscali since they have experienced financial problems for years!
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A rebrand won't cure their customer services problems. They need serious investment to do that.
One thing you forgot to mention. About 24months or so ago, Cable and Wireless were in massive financial trouble. They have only survived thanks to a massive cost-cutting exercise (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/02/cable_results/ ). It is likely they are still trying to keep costs down, so there will be little investment in services like Bulldog (which, as I said above, needs to spend an awful lot of money to improve it's customer services, whatever brand they use).