This article is more than 1 year old
Tesco to become a telco?
Maybe, maybe not
Tesco could be about to flog telecoms service to rival the likes of BT.
The FT reports that the supermarket giant is holding talks with operators to offer the services.
No one from Tesco was available for comment on the story. However, a spokesman for BT said the monster telco had no plans to start selling groceries.
News that Tesco is sniffing around telecoms services follows the introduction of reforms by telecoms regulator, Oftel, that should enable companies to offer a complete residential telephony service to consumers.
The key to this is that punters who sign up to rival providers will no longer have to receive two bills - one from their telco for call charges and one from BT for line rental.
Instead, they will just receive one bill from their telco, a move welcomed by Centrica, which has more than a million phone customers under the One.Tel and British Gas Communications brands.
In May Argos, the UK high street catalogue retailer and biggest seller of land-line phones, started offering discount phone calls through a new service called CallSave. ®
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