France Telecom SA looks likely to make a move into the UK internet service provider arena in the near future, following the launch last week of voila.co.uk, the British version of its existing VoiLa web portals. Tim Moore, head of VoiLa UK, said the incumbent telco is looking at the best way of starting in the UK market… An acquisition of an ISP would be one way of doing that.
As a standalone portal VoiLa faces a tough fight in the market, against fierce competition from the more established UK and US-based portals many of which have access services attached to them, as well as the front-ends of home-grown ISPs. It seems likely that France Telecom will soon build its own ISP capability in the UK to support its online activities, or will buy one. But there are only a few remaining independent ISPs in the UK of the size a major incumbent telco would want to buy.
The UK, along with Germany, is one of the few European countries where France Telecom has yet to launch an ISP. Its Wanadoo service is available in Belgium, Spain and Italy among other countries, and the telco owns the wanadoo.co.uk and wanadoo.de domains.
VoiLa sells itself on the basis of its thematic search engine developed by its subsidiary Echo SA. and says that this technology allows greater filtering of search hits by organizing by subject. Following the UK launch, France Telecom will launch a German version early next year.
