Vodafone Buys Cable & Wireless For $1.7B, Gives Mobile Carrier Bigger Window On Enterprise, Broadband

Big news from the UK this morning: Vodafone, one of Europe's biggest mobile operators, has made a formal offer to buy up the assets of Cable & Wireless Worldwide for ?1 billion ($1.7 billion), a deal that catapults Vodafone into running its own fixed line network in the UK and specifically will give it a much bigger view to winning enterprise business -- a big challenge to BT and a mark of further consolidation in the space. Cable & Wireless, first founded in the nineteeth century and one of the biggest operators in Europe, has fallen on hard times more recently and has run through three chief executives since a restructuring in 2010. The deal will make Vodafone the UK's second-largest operator, with ?7 billion ($10.5 billion) in annual revenue.

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