TalkTalk trash talks BT

Boxing experts will tell you that their favoured sport is a noble art that owes its appeal chiefly to skill and has very little to do with ultraviolence. This is patently untrue. We watch boxing for the same nasty, mean-spirited reason that we watched playground scraps. That is, for the sheer bloody excitement of seeing people batter one another. A spat is inherently fascinating. And I’d just as soon watch two irate football mascots in animal suits going at it as I would Ali and Foreman.

Truth be told I’m just as entertained when broadband companies take to the ring for 12 rounds. And as previous contretemps have shown, this happens more often than you’d expect. This week it’s the turn of BT and TalkTalk’s subsidiary Opal to duke it out. And as you can see here, TalkTalk, which in playground logic is to blame since they started it, have not pulled any punches.

I’m especially taken with TalkTalk’s claim that their £10 business broadband offering is so goddamn cheap that it could force rivals to go under and prompt a wave of consolidation in the broadband sector. Equal parts hugely hubristic and insulting to competitors, it’s the sort of trash-talking that even Ali, who once famously rattled Joe Frazier by calling him an Uncle Tom, might baulk at.

Whether BT’s offerings will indeed suffer as a result of the new Opal deal remains to be seen. I’d like to think that the market could be shaken up further and God knows UK-based small to medium-sized businesses could do with a break right now. One thing we can say for sure is that as the broadband sector gets more cut-throat in months to come, we’ll get more of these set-tos. And best of all we’ll get see who the real contenders are. For now, it’s round one to TalkTalk.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know on: digitalmanblog@hotmail.com