Having once again set off on the acquisition trail I thought I’d check out the level consolidation that has been going on in the ISP industry.

ISPA helped out with membership stats for 2010 and 2005 that make interesting reading.

Back in 2005 ISPA had 120 members, excluding Virtual ISPs who white label someone else’s service. Today there are 137. Nothing startling there you might think. The devil, however, is in the detail.

58 ISPs (48%) on the 2005 list are not there in 2010! 25 small (42%), 7 medium (58%), 21 large (57%) and 3 corporate (33%) names have vanished from the UK ISP landscape.

What surprised me was that the disappearances in the small category were not greater but there again if an industry is going to consolidate then the larger companies represent the low hanging fruit.

I’m sure that some of the names present in 2005 have just decided not to be members of ISPA in 2010. Cisco, for example, have either decided they no longer need to be part of the ISPA party or are moving away from the internet as a market! They are of course not an ISP anyway. The trend though is clear.

Some of the household names/victims that are not in the 2010 list are shown below for effect. Most have been acquired and/or rebranded:

Bulldog Communications Ltd
Pipex
Telewest/Blueyonder
Easynet Ltd
Energis Communications Ltd
Thus Plc
NTl
Wannadoo
Mistral Internet
PSINet
Video Networks