Bulldog Broadband

» see bulldogbroadband.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Bulldog was British at the regulatory layer, which is a strange thing for a product to be. It existed because Oftel and then Ofcom forced BT to let other companies put their own hardware inside BT's telephone exchanges, and it sold only in the exchanges where Bulldog had done that. In 2004 that meant a few dozen buildings in central London. You could not want this product from outside the map, and I could not want it from Ankara, where the wholesale line and the retail line were the same company and stayed that way.

Bulldog Communications was set up in London in may 2000 and spent its first years as a small operator with equipment in 38 BT exchanges. Cable and Wireless bought 100 per cent of it on 28 may 2004 for 18.6 million pounds, which was a cheap price for the only serious unbundled footprint in the country. C and W then spent heavily to widen it, eventually reaching around 800 exchanges.

The offer was genuinely ahead of the market. While most of Britain was on BT wholesale at 512k or 1 meg, Bulldog was selling 8 meg lines and later 24 meg, with the phone line bundled in. For about eighteen months it was the answer to the question of what fast broadband in Britain would look like once somebody other than BT owned the copper at the exchange end.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Unbundling is expensive in a way that does not show up in the marketing. You rent space in the exchange and install your own kit, and from that day you own the fault. When a BT engineer transfers a line onto your equipment and something goes wrong in the middle of that transfer, the customer has no BT to call any more. They call you.

Bulldog signed people up faster than it could carry them. Through 2005 The Register was taking what it described as an unprecedented volume of reader complaints about the same company: lines that never went live, and bills for service that had never been delivered. Ofcom opened a formal investigation on 2 september 2005 under the general conditions covering billing accuracy and complaint handling. Cable and Wireless said it was close to resolving most of the issues and blamed the BT provisioning process.

~ the unraveling ~

By february 2006 the company had attracted about 80,000 broadband users after two years and a great deal of capital, behind AOL and BT and Pipex and Wanadoo. In the same window Carphone Warehouse launched free broadband forever, bundled with a phone package, and pulled 340,000 customers in a matter of months. Bulldog had built the better network and Carphone Warehouse had built the better offer, and only one of those things gets a consumer to switch.

On 8 june 2006 Cable and Wireless announced it was leaving residential broadband. Bulldog stopped taking new consumer customers on 1 july 2006, about 150 people in sales and marketing lost their jobs, and the strategy became wholesale: rent the unbundled network to other retailers rather than face the public with it. The customer base at that point was around 120,000.

~ what it became ~

Pipex bought the remains on 7 september 2006 for 12 million pounds in cash, taking roughly 100,000 residential and small business customers along with the Bulldog brand. A separate deal gave Pipex wholesale access to the 800 unbundled exchanges. Cable and Wireless had paid 18.6 million for the company and a great deal more to grow it, and sold the retail half for less than the purchase price.

The name then went down with its buyer. Pipex was carved up and sold in pieces, its residential base ended inside Tiscali and then TalkTalk, and the last stranded Bulldog and Pipex accounts were migrated to Home Telecom during february 2012. The physical thing lasted longest: Vodafone, which had inherited the old Cable and Wireless network, finally switched off the legacy Bulldog ADSL platform in november 2019, thirteen years after the brand stopped selling. bulldogbroadband.com today serves a content farm about science.

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