CallPlus "protesters" make a point during one of the firm's many skirmishes with Telecom during the Theresa Gattung era at Telecom.

New Zealand's third largest broadband provider, CallPlus, has been bought by Australian-listed company M2 Group for $250 million.

CallPlus owns the Slingshot, Orcon and Flip internet brands, employs 600 staff and has annual revenues of about $250m. But its significance to the telecommunications industry has often dwarfed its market size.

Co-founders and majority shareholders Annette Presley and Malcolm Dick were well-known for goading Telecom over monopolistic practices prior to the unbundling of Telecom's phone network in 2006. At one point Presley handed out free bread outside Parliament in a protest over what she claimed was excessive charging by Telecom.

CallPlus is currently at the centre of another major fracas, this time with television companies over Global Mode, a free service it is offering that lets its customers subscribe to blocked overseas online television services, such as the United States version of Netflix.

Sky Television, Television New Zealand, Mediaworks and Spark subsidiary Lightbox have said they will take legal action against CallPlus and Global Mode creator Bypass Network Services unless they axe the service by 5pm on Wednesday.

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M2 chief executive Geoff Horth said the purchase of CallPlus was due to be completed by the end of June and one of the first decisions it would need to make before then, in consultation with CallPlus' existing owners, was what they wanted to do about Global Mode.

"As a soon-to-be owner of the business we will develop a view as to how we want to manage that issue. You can assume we will be consulting with the management and shareholders in the intervening period but for the moment it is not a decision in our hands," he said.

CallPlus chief executive Mark Callander said Global Mode was now back to the top of his agenda in the wake of sale announcement. The company would be responding to the television companies' demands in due course, he said.

Horth described CallPlus as an excellent business and an extraordinary success. CallPlus and brands Slingshot and Orcon would "never lose their uniquely Kiwi identity", he said.

Its existing management team would continue to lead the business under the leadership of Callander, he said, promising to "keep the big boys honest".

Callander said it would be "business as usual at CallPlus" which could now look forward to a future stage of development.

Presley said M2 was another "challenger" brand that had a similar mindset to CallPlus when it came to creating "a level playing field and creating choice" in the market.

M2 posted a net profit of A$67m (NZ$68.2m) on revenues of A$1b in the year to June and is valued on the Australian stock exchange at just over A$2b. It expected CallPlus to add NZ$45m to its operating profit in its 2016 financial year.

Telecommunications Users Association (Tuanz) chief executive Craig Young noted many of the big telcos were now majority foreign-owned, but said that could be a good thing if it led to more investment in the local market.

He said the fact CallPlus had been bought by a new market entrant meant there should not be any reduction in competition.

InternetNZ spokesman David Cormack said having a third internet service provider with "a bit of heft behind it" was positive for the industry.

"It's always a shame to lose a New Zealand-owned company. That's the only thing we see as being the downside," he said.

Cormack would not speculate on what changes the new owners might make.

IDC Research analyst Peter Wise said while CallPlus had a 13 to 14 per cent market share of the broadband market, it was still some way behind larger rivals Spark and Vodafone.

"I guess the question is whether it's going to come up with more investment in the New Zealand market; how are they going to get more scale?"

CallPlus had traditionally been a price-leader, but Wise said an increase in competition in recent years had reduced pricing differentials.

Wise said it was difficult to say whether the sale price was good, but it was a "nice round number" and the vendors had probably benefited from the exchange rate.