What a weekend

Sometimes we go for a week with no significant news, and then a slew of it hits all at once, mostly over the weekend:

• Yesterday Telecom Italia took another step forward in its cross-border broadband incursion strategy, getting a decent price from AOL for its 3.2m customers. Adding AOL's 1.1m broadband customers to its own base (745k in H1) brings it pretty much level with market number two United Internet.
• Meanwhile, Tiscali was throwing the gearbox into reverse, getting out of the Dutch market on a relative high note. As I argued here, it looks like KPN's FTTC strategy may be succeeding in discouraging some of the more marginal players from remaining in the market. With this deal, my numbers suggest KPN will have over 75% of the retail DSL market in the Netherlands - I wonder at what point the regulator begins to get uneasy?
• Also in the Netherlands, problems with UPC's digital migration strategy, which I covered here, have now reached the attention of the Dutch parliament.
• Just as Telecom Italia is piling into Germany, Reuters is this morning running a story apparently quoting a Deutsche Telekom insider as saying that the new DSL/voice bundles offered by the company have signed up 200k customers already, ahead of internal expectations.
• Back to the Netherlands, DT is launching a home-zone mobile product there for EUR6.95 per month.
• XG Technologies is going for an AIM listing in London.
• Rounding out in the Netherlands, a Palladium Club mega-uber value reader points me to a successful example of a FTTH collective in the town of Nijmegen. A group of citizens carried out a feasibility study and began a trial three months ago with 23 of the town's 2,500 homes. Now they are ready to scale up, with a cooperative ownership structure and maintenance/operations outsourced.