Among serious competitors to the UK, only in Germany is the tax burden both lower and if anything falling. For BSkyB, broadband is being pursued much more as a way of driving and defending Sky TV subscriptions than as a separate business in its own right. Broadband comes free with certain Sky packages, so buying AOL may have ended up costing revenues rather than adding to them. Rival bidders for the business may not have been as serious as they seemed. It’s not clear there was any competition at all to Carphone by the end. As a result, Mr Dunstone could perhaps have got away with paying less.

Still, on balance a good deal for Carphone.Matalan: Hargreaves comes up with doshA happy ending, of sorts, to the travails of Matalan. The stock market doubted that John Hargreaves, the founder, would ever be able to come up with the promised 200p a share to take the company private, but at the eleventh hour, and with a little help from Icelandic backers, he eventually managed it. Undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangements on content have been signed with AOL, but the content opportunity of broadband has largely been left with the original owners. Long-term, this is something Mr Dunstone might regret.Nor would the acquisition have worked for Sky in any case. The deal with Carphone is one of the last bits of the original operation to go. Instead, AOL is trying to reinvent itself as an advertising-funded internet portal in the Google and Yahoo! mould.This made the company more inclined to deal with Carphone than some of the others involved in the auction.

Carphone doesn’t compete on content, allowing AOL to continue to have access to the customer base after it has been sold off. BT has a similar arrangement with Yahoo! for one of its broadband offerings.AOL has been careful to frame the disposal of its access businesses on the Continent in similar terms. Carphone was prepared to do the type of deal AOL wanted; rivals, notably Sky and Orange, wanted to use the subscriber base to market their own content. Indeed, this is a potentially quite big downside of the deal to Carphone. After the AOL deal, Mr Dunstone can at last credibly claim to be one of the most powerful telecom brands in the country.Yesterday’s deal is equally significant, perhaps more so, for what it says about AOL as the boost it gives to Carphone. The amount of publicity it gets is out of all proportion to the size of the business.

What’s more, the best is yet to come.As things stand, both Carphone and AOL are forced expensively to use BT Wholesale to service many of their customers – AOL exclusively so. By May next year, Carphone should have achieved its target of “unbundling” 1,000 BT exchanges. By using its own equipment, rather than BT’s, Carphone significantly reduces its costs and increases the profit that can be made out of customers.Notwithstanding yesterday’s 8 per cent rise in the share price, markets may not yet fully have factored in the potential upside To date, Carphone’s Talk Talk has been largely just that. Heady days, which should serve as a powerful warning to apostles of the second dot goldrush now being acted out.Virtually the whole of AOL’s internet access business has now been flogged off, and, compared to what was paid for it, pretty thin gruel did these disposals generate too.

Bought is perhaps the wrong word, for AOL shareholders ended up with 55 per cent of the combined media goliath.Rarely if ever has there been such a massive giveaway of value, with the sturdy old media assets of Time Warner’s market-leading magazines, TV channels, movie studios and cable operations folded into the candy floss of AOL, an internet access operation whose business model was even then already dying on its feet. Hard to believe with the benefit of hindsight, but AOL was valued at an astonishing $163.4bn when it was bought by Time Warner at the height of the dot boom in January 2000. The deal is thereby immediately and powerfully earnings enhancing. Indeed the more stuff about, the more the need to sort it – or at least that is what those of us in the sorting business must surely hope..