Cable and Wireless have recently announced an increased offer to buy out Glasgow-based telco THUS plc, owners of Demon Internet. The buyout would see C&W able to compete with BT in terms of supplying big businesses with communications solutions.
Whether or not the buyout would see the Demon Business Broadband packages receive a boost is another matter. C&W are reportedly offering a generous £1.80p per share for THUS which equates to a cool £329 million. They already own just under 30 per cent of the comms operator.
Brief history lesson: Cable and Wireless can trace their lineage back to those early days of telecommunications when the British Empire existed in more than just a name. Beginning life as the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Cable Company, subsequent mergers and rebrands would later see the birth of Cable and Wireless in 1934. Nationalisation in the forties would see C&W becoming absorbed into the GPO, which of course would later give birth to BT in the 1980’s, when C&W re-emerged, selling fixed-line calls via the Mercury Communications subsidiary.
Mercury also ran mobile network operations under One2One, which was eventually taken over by T-Mobile. A merger in 1997 saw C&W reabsorbing Mercury and selling cable TV to customers along with voice calls. In 2000, C&W then sold off their digital cable assets to NTL, which would eventually become part of Virgin Media.
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