Tiscali

For other uses, see Tiscali (disambiguation).
Tiscali S.p.A.
Public
Traded as BIT: TIS
Industry Communications and Media
Founded January 1998
Headquarters Cagliari, Italy
Key people
 Vittorio Serafino (Chairman), Mario Rosso (CEO), Renato Soru (Founder)
Products Communications
Website tiscali.com

Tiscali s.p.a. (Italian: [ˈtiskali]; BIT: TIS) is an Italian telecommunications company, based in Cagliari, Sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. It previously had operations in other European nations through its acquisition of many smaller European Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the late 1990s.

History

Tiscali Campus in Cagliari

Tiscali was created in January 1998 in Cagliari by Renato Soru, following the deregulation of Italian telephone system. The company owes its name to a Sardinian mountain at which remains of an ancient village were found. From March 1999 onward, Tiscali offered Tiscali Free Net, a subscription-free Internet service where customers only had to pay for the time they were online. This pushed other Italian providers to repeal their fixed subscription fees, thus contributing to making the Internet accessible to the masses in Italy.

IPO

On October 1999 (during the dot-com bubble), the company went though an initial public offering (IPO) to be traded on the Italian stock exchange at a share price of 46 Euros. 3,098,000 shares were offered to investors of which 2,658,000 shares were created through a capital increase and the rest were sold by Soru. Soru made 20,240,000 Euros on the IPO. In 2012, the price per share had plummeted to 0.04 Euros.

Between 2001 and 2003, shares were also traded on the French stock exchange.

Services

Each of Tiscali's regional companies offer many services, which may include broadband internet access and telephone services. Between 2007 and 2008, Tiscali briefly operated an IPTV service in Italy (available in the cities of Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Turin and Trieste). Its UK television service, Tiscali TV was acquired by TalkTalk in 2009.

Tiscali's former carrier company, Tiscali International Network, was a pure-play carrier business delivering wholesale services including Global IP Connectivity, MPLS lines, Voice over IP and Network Monitoring.[1] In May 2009, its IP/MPLS backbone counted 90 Points of Presence and extended over 17 European countries and across the United States and Hong Kong. Its Autonomous System (AS3257) was a core ASN in the global Internet routing table, as well as the largest IPv6 backbone outside Asia. The network was sold to the Italian private equity firm BS Private Equity SpA on 27 May 2009, and renamed Tinet.[2]

Tiscali ran similar web portals for each of its countries, which include features such as webmail, reviews, news, videos, dating, chat, radio, TV guide, streaming TV channels and others.

Tiscali published a self-branded web browser of the same name which was distributed with its dial-up Internet packages. It was produced by UltraBrowser and used the core of Microsoft's Internet Explorer to display web pages. The software has not been included in installation packages since Tiscali's corporate rebranding in 2004.

Tiscali offered dial-up Internet access in Finland under service name Surfeu.

Tiscali Campus in Cagliari has 1,000 employees. The center includes a development division for Internet technologies where researchers like Antonio Tuzzi (one of the developers of Apple's OS X), Luca Manunza (inventor of the first webmail service) and Domenico Dato (developer of Arianna, the first Italian search engine) work.[3]

Sales and acquisitions

Beginning in 2004, Tiscali sold off many of its regional sub-companies to native telecommunications operators in order to focus more on prime target areas.

Financial and economic data

On 31 December 2009:

Shareholders

Today, the shareholders of Tiscali are:

See also

References

  1. ↑ Tiscali Network
  2. 1 2 "Tiscali International Network acquisition concluded by BS Private Equity". Press release. Cagliari, Milano. 26 May 2009. Archived from the original on 7 July 2010. Retrieved 22 June 2013.
  3. ↑ http://economia.panorama.it/tech-social/Tiscali-web-made-in-italy-Silicon-Valley-No-Sardegna Archived February 24, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
  4. ↑ Tiscali - 2004 milestones.
  5. ↑ Tiscali - 2005 milestones.
  6. ↑ Tiscali - Disposal of B2C activities in Germany
  7. ↑ Tiscali - Disposal of B2B activities in Germany.
  8. ↑ Tiscali disposes of Netherlands branch
  9. ↑ Telecom Paper - Tiscali to focus on UK, Italy; plans net profit from 2008.
  10. ↑ Tiscali powers down IPTV service.
  11. ↑ Update 1 - Carphone wins EU approval for Tiscali UK buy Reuters.com. 30 June 2009
  12. ↑ Tiscali TV rebrands as TalkTalk.
  13. ↑ Telecom Paper - Tiscali shareholders approve new board, share issue.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/17/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.