Kabel BW

» see kabelbw.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In August 2013 a court in Dusseldorf took away a merger that had already happened. The Oberlandesgericht Dusseldorf set aside the Bundeskartellamt's clearance of Liberty Global's purchase of Kabel BW, upholding complaints brought by NetCologne and Deutsche Telekom. By then the two cable companies had been sitting under a single holding for over a year and their networks were being run as one business. The court did not admit a further appeal, so the buyer went to the Bundesgerichtshof to ask for one, and the biggest cable deal in Germany spent another eighteen months in a condition most industries never experience: fully operational and without valid permission.

Kabel BW was the cable network of Baden-Wurttemberg, headquartered in Heidelberg and created in 2000 when Deutsche Telekom began selling off its regional cable systems. That origin is the whole reason it existed as a separate thing. Germany's cable plant was carved into regional blocks rather than sold whole, which produced a set of operators that each owned one piece of the country and spent the next fifteen years trying to buy each other. Kabel Deutschland tried to take Kabel BW along with ish and iesy in 2004 and the competition authorities stopped it.

Nothing about this reached me, and the reason is more specific than distance. A German cable franchise was not a product anyone outside its footprint could want or refuse: you got Kabel BW because your building was wired by the company that had bought your state's share of the old Bundespost network. In Turkey the same years meant a TTNet line over copper, and the question of who owned the coax running past the house never came up, because there was none.

~ the record ~

~ four owners in eleven years ~

The ownership record reads like a private-equity relay. Callahan and Associates took 55 percent at the outset. Deutsche Telekom sold its remaining stake in 2003 to a consortium led by Blackstone. Blackstone sold to the Swedish house EQT in 2006, at a price never disclosed but reported at around 1.3 billion euros. EQT put the company up for sale in 2010 and Liberty Global bought it in 2011 for 3.16 billion euros.

The business those owners passed between them was growing the whole time. German Wikipedia records 2.3 million customers and 3.5 million connectable households as of 2006, and the purchase of Tele Columbus's Baden-Wurttemberg operations added another 400,000 customers. For the last full year it reported on its own, 2011, revenue was 606.6 million euros against 798 employees. Put together with Unitymedia's networks in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, the combined operator covered 12.6 million connected households.

~ what the cartel office made them promise ~

The Bundeskartellamt cleared the purchase on 15 December 2011, but not freely. It attached conditions that tell you exactly what it was afraid of. Liberty Global had to grant special termination rights under its largest access contracts with the housing industry, the landlords and co-operatives who sign cable deals on behalf of whole buildings full of people who never chose the supplier. It had to waive exclusivity under all such contracts, along with its ownership and dismantling rights over in-building distribution networks. And it had to stop scrambling free-to-air television, feeding those channels in unencrypted standard definition instead.

Read as a list those are technical. Read as a description of the market they are an admission that a German cable customer was captured twice over, once by the wire in the wall and once by a contract their landlord had signed. NetCologne and Deutsche Telekom argued the conditions were not enough, and in August 2013 the Dusseldorf court agreed with them.

~ the day it stopped being a brand ~

The legal knot came undone in February 2015, when Unitymedia reached an agreement with Deutsche Telekom and NetCologne and the takeover became binding at last. The brand had about six weeks left. Liberty Global had already announced the plan in late November 2014, and in March 2015 the trade magazine Horizont ran it under a headline about Unitymedia burying the Kabel BW name, reporting that from April the company would appear across its entire territory under the single name Unitymedia.

It happened on 1 April 2015. Dslweb marked the day with a piece whose own first line conceded that nobody could call it a surprise, and then put the change in one sentence: Kabel BW is from now on called Unitymedia in Baden-Wurttemberg too. New customers could only buy from Unitymedia from that moment. The service never stopped for anyone, roughly 3.6 million connected households kept working, and what ended was a word on an invoice. The company itself continued as Unitymedia BW GmbH and then, after Vodafone bought Unitymedia, as Vodafone BW GmbH. kabelbw.de still resolves today and sends you to a Vodafone page.

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