Broadband acquisitions heat up in Europe

Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is coming with a vengeance in Europe as operators look to gobble up broadband service providers. It appears that France Telecom's Orange UK and BSkyB are the highest bidders in the first round for an auction of AOL UK's assets. O2 recently acquired DSL upstart Be Un Limited while Telefonica is bidding for AOL's Italian and German assets. Vodafone has already announced its intention to enter the fixed broadband market. Operators want to race into the FMC market so they can offer their consumer and business customers combined fixed/mobile services packages designed to encourage users to abandon their fixed voice services. It's an interesting turn of events given the fact that most of the operators looking to buy broadband assets shed them a few years ago to focus on core operations, primarily wireless.

To read more about the broadband buying sprees in Europe:
- check out this article from LightReading