They are truly lost. They even purchased a consultancy company for over £24 Million a couple of years ago (Smart421) and that consultancy had virtually no IP and the majority of staff were contractors ! The charismatic founder left and now sales are significantly down in that business. It shows KCOM are clutching at straws, strategy is missing.

What next ? This is a difficult market - look at the difficulties faces by COLT. KCOM could take a lead over BT and Virgin by offering Hull consumers low cost, fast (=>20 Mbit/s) broadband. Alas, I think the company needs new management or at least a new head of strategy. I would think telecomms is core and IT Consultancy is not - alas, they paid a premium and won't get a fraction of the money if they tried to sell off their troubled Smart421 division.

I liked Kingston - I migrated two companies over to them in the late 90's after BT showed no interest in helping move headquarters building and expanding our WAN across the UK. Kingston came up with an innovative solution which covered a high degree of resilience and gave us a path to migrate the WAN from dialup & leased lines to ISDN and then ASDL as it came on line. Never had a problem with sales or technical and they were pretty proactive in contacting us. They even got the billing right - something BT had been unable to do for years. Always recommended them to other IT Managers over BT

Left Yorkshire 5 years ago so it looks as if they got a bit too big for their boots recently.

They're the saddos providing staff for 118800

http://www.humberbusiness.com/news/KCOM-centre-launches-mobile-phone-directory/article-1082538-detail/article.html

David 64:

Not quite by themselves here anymore, but still the biggest. We use Quickline internet in Hull (over the air broadband) and it's as speedy and stable as anything ... and no, I don't work for them. :)

Personally I love being with Eclipse- shame they cant get the rest of the operation up to that standard

I used to work there back in the early 00s - they didn't know their ar*e from their elbow back then and it doesn't appear that they have changed much. Whilst there, I worked for "Kingston Internet", "Kingston inbusiness", then "Kingston Communications" all without leaving my desk :)

Bad management and greed has brought down a company that was loved by many in the Hull area for nearly 100 years.