Cable & Wireless Worldwide

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

~ the goodbye ~

The company was older than the telephone. Cable and Wireless traced itself to 1869 and the business interests of Sir John Pender, who founded the Falmouth, Malta, Gibraltar Telegraph Company and the British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company in that year, then merged his companies into the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872. Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent four years after that. For most of the century that followed, this was the company that put cable on the floor of oceans so that one part of an empire could talk to another.

On 26 March 2010 the group split itself in two. The international business demerged as Cable and Wireless Communications and took a listing of its own. The remainder, the British and enterprise network operation, stayed inside the original plc and renamed itself Cable and Wireless Worldwide. So the half that kept the old name was the half with the least connection to it: managed voice and data services, sold to large corporates and to governments, with operations running from Asia Pacific to North America.

No consumer ever chose it. Enterprise network gets bought by procurement departments, and it shows up in a normal person's life as a name in a route trace, several hops past your own operator, on the way to somewhere else. From Turkey that was the only way the name arrived at all. There was never a Cable and Wireless you could subscribe to here, no box, no bill, just a string in a traceroute that meant your packets were somebody else's problem for a while.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the half that kept the name ~

The network it sold had been assembled by purchase. Mercury Communications was set up as a subsidiary in February 1982 to be the licensed competitor to British Telecom, and in 1997 Mercury was merged with three cable operators and renamed Cable and Wireless Communications. Energis, the company that had strung fiber along the national grid's pylons, was bought in August 2005 for 674 million pounds. Thus, the Scottish operator, was taken in October 2008.

Every one of those deals happened before the 2010 split, which is the thing to understand about Cable and Wireless Worldwide: three years old when it died, and most of what it sold had been built by companies it had bought.

~ three warnings and a share price ~

The shares hit 98.5 pence after the split, valuing the group at $4.25 billion. By November 2011 they were worth 13 pence. On 28 June 2011 the board accepted the resignation of chief executive Jim Marsh, after what the press counted as a third profit warning, and the chairman John Pluthero moved into the chief executive's chair. Pluthero had form for candor: in 2006, running the UK business of the undivided company, he wrote a staff memo that the Sunday Times got hold of, which described the business as being in bad shape and the industry as something unprintable.

He lasted until 14 November 2011, when the company hired Gavin Darby, a former Vodafone executive, as chief executive instead. Five months and nine days after Darby started, Vodafone agreed to buy the company.

~ thirty-eight pence ~

The offer, announced on 23 April 2012, was 38 pence a share and 1.04 billion pounds for the lot. Measured against the November low that is nearly three times the money, and measured against the post-demerger high it is a little over a third. On 18 June 2012 the shareholders voted it through, comfortably past the 75 percent the scheme needed. The purchase completed on 30 July 2012.

Vodafone ran it as a separate thing for eight more months and then stopped. Cable and Wireless Worldwide was fully integrated into Vodafone on 1 April 2013, which is the date the registers give as the end. Today cablewireless.com answers with 27 kilobytes of a domain-for-sale page, the kind with a consent banner and a tracking script bolted to it. A lineage traced to 1869, and the last thing at that address is a listing.

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