Tiscali buys Pipex home broadband customers

Freedom2Surf and Nildram also bundled as part of £210m deal

Tiscali has bought the consumer voice and broadband divisions of veteran service provider Pipex Communications.

The £210m deal also gives Tiscali the service providers Freedom2Surf and Nildram.

Pipex will keep its corporate broadband customers, though it seemsTiscali will gain some 100,000 small-business customers largely though Nildram.

The deal also gives it 470,000 other broadband customers, plus 650,000 for telephony, of whom 250,000 are "dual-play" – that is, they are buy both telephony and data services.

Tiscali will be hoping to turn all its new customers on to triple-play by offering them TV and demand. It has installed its own DSL equipment in 800 BT exchanges, offering fast DSL to a claimed 55 percent of UK homes.

Tiscali UK chief executive Mary Turner said the deal "further cements Tiscali’s position as a fully integrated telecom and media operator in the top league of the UK market."

The Pipex divisions have been on the market for several weeks, and an early bidder was rumoured to be Virgin Media.

Pipex Wireless, a joint venture with Intel which is poised to Wimax broadband service, is not part of the Tiscali deal.