“The acquisition of Telecom Direct, a firm established in 1997, has transformed Adept from an £18m to £30m company. We are now in the UK’s top ten and clearly a far more significant player in the market.
The deal we have reached with Opal Telecom is equally significant in that is it the largest LLU agreement reached for migration of PSTN traffic to a next generation network (NGN).”
Fishwick continued, “We are pleased to be breaking BT’s monopoly on line rental in a deal that will see our customers migrating to Carphone Warehouse’s LLU network over the next three years. We will initially be migrating a significant proportion of our single line (residential) PSTN traffic and furthermore the deal with OPAL/CPW will enable us to access broadband on a more cost effective basis for our customers. This is the largest reseller move to an NGN in the market and comes three years ahead of BT’s anticipated availability of their own 21CN.
This move with Opal places Adept smack in the middle of the voice and data convergence market and opens up many new opportunities for ourselves and our customers. Our acquisition of Telecom Direct provides us the scale we have been looking for.”
Fishwick says that over the next 12-18 months he will be introducing a whole new range of products and applications.
“Free ‘on-net’ calls will be a great cost saving benefit for our multi-site customers as well as the remote and home-working community.
We now have some 28,000 business customers on our portfolio and one market we expect to attack is BT’s £600m monopoly of ISDN30.”
Fishwick concludes by stating that he believes the reseller market is breaking in two.
“The larger reseller players have a ready access to a range of voice and data convergence products that the smaller companies do not. We are now a big player.”