It is a brave company that takes on Britain’s crowded home communications market.

With its £210 million of acquisition of Pipex, Tiscali is signalling its intent to do just that.

After being forced to pull back from markets around the world — today it focuses on just the UK and Italy — Tiscali had long been regarded as a likely buyout candidate itself. Instead the group, which has more than 1.48 million UK broadband customers, is determined to take on the might of BT, Virgin Media and BSkyB and become a fully fledged “triple-play” provider of television, broadband and fixed-line services.

The strategy kicked off with its merger, last year, with HomeChoice, the pioneering video-on-demand service, and will be cemented by its move to snap-up Pipex.

As broadband competition intensifies a host of smaller players — and some well-known names such as AOL UK — have already fallen prey to their bigger rivals who are keen to maximise efficiencies on their infrastructure by scaling-up their broadband bases.

Tiscali is now the last remaining major independent base in the UK and unlike Pipex, which was built up through a series of acquisitions, does not present a buyer with the problems of a messy, cluttered base.

Bigger players are powering ahead: In an update this week Sky, which is 39.1 per cent owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, revealed it had picked up more than 700,000 customers in just a year.

Without some seriously strong performance Tiscali’s own days as an independent player could be numbered.

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