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This article discusses the cable-provider NTL Incorporated. For other uses of NTL see NTL (disambiguation)
NTL Incorporated
Company typePublic: (Nasdaq: NTLI)
IndustryCable Communications
Founded1992
HeadquartersUnited States Corporate: New York, NY, USA
United Kingdom Operational: Hook, Hampshire, UK
Key people
James Mooney, Chairman
Stephen Burch, Chief Executive
Jacques Kerrest Chief Financial Officer
ProductsCable television
Broadband
Telephone
Mobile phone
Revenue$6.10 billion (2005)
Number of employees
22,500 (2005)
Websitewww.ntl.com

NTL Incorporated, a U.S.-listed British company, has become the first "quadruple-play" media-company in the UK, bringing together television, Internet, mobile phone and fixed-line telephone services. While NTL has its headquarters in New York City, the company's activities focus heavily on the United Kingdom, with operational headquarters in Hook, Hampshire.

NTL has become the dominant cable operator in the United Kingdom, controlling more than 90% of the market. The company formed as the result of the 2006 merger of the UK's two major cable services companies, NTL Holdings and Telewest Global. NTL also owns mobile operator Virgin Mobile and Virgin.net, which supplies Internet services in non-cabled areas via ADSL and dial-up. NTL also produces content through its Flextech subsidiary. In 2005 residential services generated 78% of NTL's revenue, and business services 22%.

On 2006-11-08, NTL announced that it would rebrand as Virgin Media in the first quarter of 2007[1].

History

1992 - 2006

NTL

Barclay Knapp and George Blumenthal, the founders of the cellular network company Cellular Communications, Inc. (sold to Airtouch in 1996), established International CableTel in 1993. They founded CableTel in order to take advantage of the deregulation of the UK cable market. Initially, Cabletel acquired local cable franchises covering Guildford and parts of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In 1996 CableTel acquired National Transcommunications Limited (NTL), the privatised UK Independent Broadcasting Authority transmission-network. In 1998 CableTel adopted "NTL" as its new name.

The company spent heavily: both on expanding its network and on acquiring rivals. The company also began to expand outside the UK in 2000, buying into markets on continental Europe and in Ireland.

A collapse of the telecommunications markets from mid-2000 dealt a serious blow to the company. This, combined with NTL's rapid acquisition of local cable-operators, led to severe integration problems. NTL, struggling to cope with rapid expansion and suffering from significant customer-service problems, then had to contend with the setting up in November 2002 of one of the UK's first consumer lobby-groups, nthellworld, with ntl:hell following shortly after. As a complementary move, a team of NTL employees founded www.chetnet.co.uk to provide customers with a site focused on providing expert advice on its subject-matter.

Devalued and struggling with debts of around $18bn, NTL had to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy-protection in May 2002 in order to organise a refinancing deal. The company did not emerge from protection until January 2003, having converted around $11bn of debt into shares — technically, this amounted to the largest debt default in US corporate history. The company reduced its debt to $6.4bn. A re-organisation split NTL itself into NTL Inc. (covering the UK and Irish markets) and NTL Europe Inc. (for the French, Swiss and German parts of the corporation). New executives replaced the NTL president, CEO and co-founder Barclay Knapp, as well as Stephen Carter, the MD and COO.

After exiting from Chapter 11 protection NTL produced an operating profit. In 2004 it announced plans to split the broadcasting division off from the main company. In December 2004 NTL sold its broadcast-unit to a consortium led by Macquarie Communications Infrastructure Group (MCG) for £1.27 billion. (Macquarie renamed the division Arqiva in May 2005.) This sale allowed NTL to focus on its "core businesses" of providing communications packages and cable services.

In Autumn 2004, NTL purchased the remaining shares of the Internet service provider (ISP) virgin.net, originally a joint venture between NTL and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group[2]

By 2005 its UK network consisted of a 7,800 km fibre backbone with the potential to reach 8.4 million residential homes and around 610,000 businesses. In January of that year, NTL started rolling out Video On Demand. With content selected by NTL, this service covers genres including music videos, children's programming and adult entertainment. This provides an extension to the basic 'pay per view' services the company offered for film and sport content. The new service allows customers to rewind, fast forward and pause content.

Despite NTL Ireland turning a profit, in May 2005, NTL sold their Dublin, Galway, and Waterford cable business (which they had acquired in 1999 for €825 million from the Irish government) to UGC Europe for €325 million — this after having spent in excess of €100 million on network infrastructure (i.e. making a gross loss of €500 million - more than 50% - over what they paid). As of September 2006 Liberty continues to use the NTL brand in Ireland, but analysts predict that UPC will eventually replace the branding.

By July 2005, NTL had cut its debt to £1.445 billion with an operating cashflow of £178 million. The company had 3.2 million customers buying at least one service from them, with the 1.4 million subscribers to broadband services making NTL the market leader in this field.

Telewest

Main article: Telewest § Company_history

NTL/Telewest merger

From late 2003 discussions commenced on a merger between Telewest and NTL. Thanks to their geographically different areas, NTL and Telewest had co-operated previously, as in re-directing potential customers living outside their respective areas. On October 3, 2005, NTL announced a USD$6 billion purchase of Telewest, forming one of the largest media companies in the UK. The merger agreement as structured would have left NTL having to negotiate with BBC Worldwide, the BBC's commercial arm, due to a change-of-ownership clause written into the agreement for UKTV, a joint venture with Telewest's Flextech content division. To prevent this, Telewest instead acquired NTL.

The parties completed the merger on March 3, 2006, making the merged company the UK's largest cable-provider, with more than 90% of the market. Once merged, the combined company renamed itself to NTL Incorporated, with ex-NTL shareholders controlling 75% of the stock and ex-Telewest shareholders 25%. Nine of the eleven directors of the new board came from NTL and two from Telewest.

Virgin Mobile merger

Plans envisage the Virgin brand extending across all of NTL's current operations in early 2007.
Plans envisage the Virgin brand extending across all of NTL's current operations in early 2007.

In December 2005 NTL and Virgin Mobile announced that talks had taken place regarding a merger.

Virgin Mobile's independent directors rejected the original bid of £817 million ($1.4 billion), taking the view that NTL's bid "undervalued the business". Sir Richard Branson reportedly expressed confidence that a re-structured deal could go ahead, and in January 2006 NTL increased its offer to £961m (372p per share). On 4 April 2006, NTL Incorporated announced a £962.4m recommended offer for Virgin Mobile. According to reports, Branson accepted a mix of shares and cash, making him a 10.7% shareholder of the combined company.

The takeover completed on 4 July 2006 creating the UK's first 'quadruple play' media company, bringing together television, Internet broadband, mobile-phone and fixed-line phone services. The deal included a 30-year exclusive branding agreement that will see NTL adopt the Virgin name across its consumer operations as it merges operations with its current Telewest brand. As a result, 2006-11-08 NTL announced it would change its name to Virgin Media Plc [1].

Rumoured private equity bid

On August 16 2006, The Times reported that the ntl Incorporated group could become the subject of a £10bn-takeover-bid from a private-equity firm consortium made up of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain, Cinven, Blackstone and Providence Private Equity with a formal approach expected within a fortnight. The £10bn figure would include £6bn worth of debt already on the NTL balance-sheet. Additional new banking facilities would probably fund the private-equity bid. As of January 2007 no such bid has materialised.

ITV merger

On Thursday, 2006-11-09, NTL announced that it had approached commercial television broadcaster ITV about a proposed merger [3], after a similar announcement by ITV[4]. BSkyB effectively blocked the merger on 2006-11-17 when it controversially bought a 17.9% stake in ITV plc [5], a move that attracted anger from NTL shareholder Richard Branson[6] and an investigation from media and telecoms regulator Ofcom[7]. On 2006-12-06, NTL announced that it had complained to the Office of Fair Trading about BSkyB's move, and that it would withdraw its attempt to buy ITV plc, stating that it did not believe that it could currently make a deal on favourable terms. [8]

Services

NTL currently offers services branded as NTL, Telewest, Virgin Mobile, and Virgin.net. On February 2 2007, it will rebrand under the Virgin Media name[1], harmonising NTL and Telewest services and pricing from 2007-02-01. [9]

NTL

Internet

NTL offers broadband Internet access connections through cable. The service operates through SACMs (Stand-alone cable modems) and set-top boxes (STBs).

Current download speeds offered to NTL/Telewest cable users include 2 Mbit/s, 4 Mbit/s and 10 Mbit/s, having upload speeds of 200kbit/s, 400kbits/s, and 512kbits/s respectively. [10] In NTL areas customers can also access a 512kbps download-speed; and both NTL and Telewest offer dial-up Internet services on a pay-as-you-go basis, or at a fixed monthly fee of £14.99 for unlimited usage.

The broadband services do not have a bandwidth-cap or a fair-usage policy, and NTL's acceptable-use policy [11] appears more liberal than that of most ISPs in the UK. This means that customers have unlimited usage and need pay no extra charges related to the amount of data downloaded. However NTL has admitted introducing traffic shaping. [12]

NTL has started trialing 20Mbit/s, and temporarily upgraded some 10Mbit/s subscribers to this speed in October 2006. [13] The 20Mbit/s service reportedly supports 768Kbit/s upstream, though some users have reported seeing upstream speeds of 1 Mbit/s [citation needed]. Furthermore, NTL has started conducting trials of a 100Mbit broadband service on its cable network. [14] [15]

After trials in the Guildford area from summer 1999, NTL launched its original broadband services at the same time that NTL acquired the Cable business of Cable and Wireless (spring 2000). In the "original NTL" (also known as "Langley") areas, NTL has always supplied broadband services via DOCSIS cable-modems. In these areas the digital television set-top boxes used an incompatible standard, DAVIC.

The roll-out of broadband services in the ex-Cable and Wireless franchises started in mid 2001. Initially, NTL provided ex-Cable and Wireless subscribers with broadband through the set-top box (STB) also used for digital television services, adopting the rationale that subscribers could self-install. Initially, NTL supplied a "Self Install Kit" consisting of connecting cable, adapters and an install CD. Following demonstrated problems, NTL gradually introduced cable modems and phased out the self-install approach,

The Pace STBs proved highly problematic, exhibiting two major flaws. Firstly, large numbers of connections (for example, those with peer-to-peer (P2P) software) would cause the connection to slow down and eventually freeze the modem part of the STB (also required for interactive TV services, which suffered a similar effect when downloading). Customers in these circumstances had to re-boot the STB.

Secondly, the single processor and sharing the internal modem between television and broadband services made the television part of the box slow and unresponsive, for example making it extremely difficult to change channel using the remote. This became particularly evident when using the lower "Tiers of Service" such the 128kbps downstream 64kbps upstream, as the digital television set-top box without broadband service actually enjoyed a 256kbps upstream.

Although capable of higher speeds (up to 4Mbps), NTL did not make speeds higher than 1Mbps available due to degradation of the DTV service.

NTL eventually replaced the Pace set-top boxes with Samsung models that used a dual-processor architecture, overcoming the shortcomings of the Pace, and capable of much better downstream performance. However, with the advent of higher "Tiers of Service" of 10Mbps downstream and higher, plus the reducing cost of NTL's cable modems (supplied by Ambit Broadband) NTL now supplies all subscribers with cable modems.

A historical view of NTL cable modems appears online at the Chetnet site.

The NTL network runs through transparent proxy servers. Up to 15 server addresses host each area. These transparent proxy servers also override the user's hosts file and prevent manual DNS updates. This makes it easier for NTL to provide a more reliable connection as well as being able to monitor traffic requirements in each area. This also causes many problems for websites which record IP addresses to ban and/or track users. This means that if a website bans one offender, it bans everyone in the same area. Also, many on-line games automatically ban IP addresses with multiple usernames associated with them. Small-scale games do not cause too many problems, but when friends attempt to spread the game around, the system prevents everyone (including the original player) from using the game. On the other hand, advanced users can easily create a large number of illegitimate accounts on the aforementioned websites, allowing one user both to prevent all other users on the NTL network using the game, as well as to become untraceable.

Some of the STBs cannot support connection speeds above 1Mb. As many customers took up their connections before the system-wide upgrade from 1Mb to 2Mb basic rate, one commonly finds that people have paid for a 2Mb connection, whilst only having a 1Mb connection.

NTL has used MAC addresses to track and register customers to the NTL internet service. As NTL had not supported the use of routers, or XBOX on the minority Set Top Box based Broadband Internet service, users had to use a clone MAC address feature to connect to the Internet when using an STB. This has become a common problem for people wishing to connect their X-Box to the existing internet connection through a router or PC connected to their STB, if they fail to use the official registration process. (These comments do not apply to the majority (>90%) use of cable modems).

Television

The digital television service offers a number of different products including true video on demand, a PVR, and HDTV. On 1 September 2006 NTL introduced the FreeTV digital package to its telephone subscribers free of charge. However, value-pack customers lose their value-pack discounts if they integrate the FreeTV deal into their existing packages.

PVR and High Definition services
Main article: TV Drive

NTL launched TV Drive, its High-definition Television (HDTV) and Digital Video Recorder (PVR) service in Glasgow and Teesside on 2006-11-16 [16]. The service relies on the service of the same name offered in NTL's Telewest areas. The service uses a new PVR set-top-box, with three tuners and a 160GB hard disk for up to 80 hours recording. The presence of three tuners means that TV Drive can record two channels at the same time while watching a third. This contrasts with most other PVR systems such as Sky+, which can only have two tuners. Ntl plans to have this service available in 12 million homes by early 2007.

Video on Demand

NTL has started to roll out its Video on Demand (VoD) service branded "NTL On Demand". NTL On Demand uses the Teleport system on Telewest's network. In contrast to Sky Digital which, due to technical limitations, can only provide near-VOD services, NTL On Demand provides a true VoD system. The service allows customers of NTL Digital television to download programmes as and when they want to watch them from servers at the customer's local head-end. As the broadcaster automatically stores content on NTL's servers, it removes the need to pre-record many programmes. Users can search through a large library of programmes and watch them when they want to as part of their subscription. This library includes a free 7-day watch-again feature for TV-programmes produced by the BBC, Channel 4 and Flextech. NTL also offers other television-shows, films (service branded FilmFlex), and music videos, mostly for an additional fee. The VoD service also provides HD content that will work in conjunction with the TVDrive PVR.

Fixed-line telephone

NTL also provides telephone services to its customers, as the second-largest fixed-line telephony provider in the UK, behind BT, who until 1984 held the monopoly on fixed-line telephony services in the UK.

Telewest

Main article: Telewest

Virgin Mobile

Main article: Virgin Mobile

Virgin.net

Main article: Virgin.net

For customers who do not live in cabled areas, NTL offers an ADSL broadband service through BT landlines under the Virgin.net brand, which it acquired in 2004[2] from Virgin Group, who founded it in 1996. Virgin.net customers receive up to 8 Mbit/s downstream and 400 kbit/s upstream. The service offers various usage-allowances depending on which package a user takes. Virgin.net also offers a dial-up service. Virgin.net also offers bundled phone-services via Carrier Preselect (CPS) to broadband subscribers.

Prior to acquiring Virgin.net, NTL offered a similar package called NTL Freedom.

ntl:Telewest Business

NTL also provides extensive business telephony and data network services that provide a significant portion of its revenue streams, and carrier services to other telcos.

Broadcasting

Main article: Flextech

NTL owns Flextech, a content-provider with a number of wholly-owned channels (including Bravo and LIVINGtv). Additionally, Flextech has a 50% share in UKTV (with BBC Worldwide), and owns Sit-Up Ltd, who operate the Screenshop, bid tv, price-drop tv and speed auction tv.

References

  1. ^ a b c "Virgin Media is on its way" (Press release). NTL. 2006-11-08. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ a b "NTL takes control of Virgin Net". BBC News. 2004-09-28. Retrieved 2006-12-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ "Ntl Incorporated Discussions with ITV plc" (Press release). NTL. 2006-11-09. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ "ITV and NTL 'in merger talks'" (Press release). ITV plc. 2006-11-09. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  5. ^ Welsh, James (2006-11-17). "Sky buys 17.9% of ITV". Digital Spy. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  6. ^ Wilkes, Neil (2006-11-20). "Sky/ITV: Branson statement in full". Digital Spy. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ Welsh, James (2006-11-21). "Ofcom examines impact of Sky's ITV stake". Digital Spy. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ^ Oatts, Joanne (2006-12-06). "NTL complains about Sky as it drops plans for ITV Ofcom". Digital Spy. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ^ http://www.whycable.co.uk/pricechanges/faqs.html
  10. ^ http://home.ntl.com/websales/product.do?id=227
  11. ^ http://www.home.ntl.com/page/userpolicy
  12. ^ http://www.cableforum.co.uk/article/292/ntltelewest-admits-traffic-shaping-on-its-network
  13. ^ http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=475832&page=1&pp=25
  14. ^ http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/default.asp?ArticleID=13405
  15. ^ http://www.techdigest.tv/2006/02/ntl_trials_100m.html
  16. ^ "ntl customers to experience high definition TV" (Press release). NTL. 2006-11-16. Retrieved 2006-12-07. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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