Carphone Warehouse has bid just under £450 million for Tiscali UK – a quarter less than the £600 million the Italian ISP hoped for, Times Online says. But there’s said to be another bid on the table, too. All the usual suspects were thought to have showed interest after the company put itself up for sale in May, though it was clearly optimistic in expecting a deal would be done by June.
A sale to Carphone, newly wealthy after selling half of its electronics retail unit to Best Buy for £1.1 billion, would pair Carphone’s 2.8 million broadband users with Tiscali’s 1.8 million, creating a UK broadband giant with wide-ranging peripheral interests in IPTV, mobile and landline, computer sales and more. Carphone not just its own TalkTalk ISP but also that of AOL (NYSE: TWX) UK.