Carphone bids for Tiscali to become UK’s biggest ISP

Carphone Warehouse has made a bid to buy the UK arm of Italian telecoms company Tiscali for an offer of less than 450 million', according to reports.

The company has been up for sale since the beginning of the year. The Sunday Times reported that the bid is 25 per cent less than Tiscali's original valuation of 600 million.

The auction for Tiscali's UK and Italian broadband operations originally started in April - but finding a buyer has been difficult with operators like BT, BSkyB and Vodafone walking away from the process.

If successful the bid will make Carphone the biggest ISP in the UK, overtaking BT and adding Tiscali's 1.84 million customers to Carphone Warehouse's 2.8 million. Tiscali is currently the UK's fourth largest ISP.

The bid comes a few months after Carphone Warehouse delivered a downbeat sales assessment. This was said to be due to the weak economic climate as well as heavy competition.

However the company, which owns TalkTalk and the UK arm of AOL, now has 1 billion to play with after it sold half of its retail division to US electronics retail giant Best Buy earlier this year.