NTL Incorporated
NTL Incorporated, branded as ntl:, was a United States-listed British company founded in 1992, which provided cable television, cable internet and fixed-line cable telephone services. While NTL had its headquarters in New York City, the company's activities focused heavily on the United Kingdom, with operational headquarters in Hook, Hampshire.
NTL became the dominant cable operator in the United Kingdom, controlling more than 90% of the market. In 2005 residential services generated 78% of NTL's revenue, and business services 22%.
In March 2006, NTL merged with fellow cable telecom company Telewest, and created 'NTL:Telewest', which then also merged with Virgin Mobile UK and Virgin.net in June 2006, creating the UK's first "quadruple play" telecom provider, offering television, internet, landline phone and mobile phone services. In February 2007, NTL:Telewest was rebranded as Virgin Media.
History
1992–2006
and George Blumenthal, the founders of American cellular network company Cellular Communications, Inc., established International CableTel in 1993 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, the privatised UK Independent Broadcasting Authority transmission-network. In May 1998 CableTel adopted "NTL" as its new name.The company spent heavily: both on expanding its network and on acquiring rivals. In July 1999, NTL purchased the consumer assets of Cable & Wireless plc for nearly £8.2 billion, integrating the telephone, internet and television operations of Cable & Wireless into its own ever-expanding operation.
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. and NTL Europe Inc.. 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 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 late 2004, NTL purchased the remaining shares of the Internet service provider virgin.net, originally a joint venture between NTL and Richard Branson's Virgin Group.
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 covered genres including music videos, children's programming and adult entertainment, as an extension to the basic 'pay per view' services the company offered for film and sport content. The new service allowed 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 to UGC Europe for €325 million – this after having spent in excess of €100 million on network infrastructure, resulting in a loss of €500 million, more than 50% of the purchase price. Liberty Global continued to use the NTL brand in Ireland, but was eventually merged with Chorus Communications and rebranded as UPC Ireland in May 2010.
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
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 3 October 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 3 March 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:Telewest, 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
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, 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. 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, which was completed on 4 July 2006, created 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 saw NTL adopt the Virgin name across its consumer operations as it merged operations with its current Telewest brand. As a result, on 8 November 2006, NTL announced it would change its name to Virgin Media plc.
Proposed ITV merger
In November 2006, NTL announced that it had approached commercial television broadcaster ITV about a proposed merger. BSkyB effectively blocked the merger on 12 November 2006, when it controversially bought a 17.9% stake in ITV plc, a move that attracted anger from NTL shareholder Richard Branson and an investigation from media and telecoms regulator Ofcom. On 6 December 2006, 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.Services
Internet
NTL offered broadband Internet access connections through cable. The service operates through SACMs and set-top boxes.In NTL areas customers could also access a 512 kbit/s 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 did not have a bandwidth-cap or a fair-usage policy; 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.
NTL started trialling 20 Mbit/s, and temporarily upgraded some 10 Mbit/s subscribers to this speed in October 2006. Furthermore, NTL started conducting trials of a 100 Mbit broadband service on its cable network.
After trials in the Guildford area from mid-1999, NTL launched its original broadband services at the same time that NTL acquired the Cable business of Cable and Wireless. In the "original NTL" 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.
Initially, NTL decided to terminate service to approximately 90,000 ex-Cable and Wireless subscribers on short notice. This threatened to leave customers stranded and without access to their email or websites and was due to NTL's lack of infrastructure capability in some areas. Before termination of services, Boltblue struck a deal with NTL and Cable and Wireless Communications to save 90,000
and later an additional 210,000 customers. The roll-out of broadband services in the ex-Cable and Wireless franchises started in mid 2001.
NTL provided ex-Cable and Wireless subscribers with broadband through the set-top box 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 would cause the connection to slow down and eventually freeze the modem part of the STB. 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 128 kbit/s downstream 64 kbit/s upstream, as the digital television set-top box without broadband service actually enjoyed a 256 kbit/s upstream.
Although capable of higher speeds, NTL did not make speeds higher than 1 Mbit/s 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 10 Mbit/s downstream and higher, plus the reducing cost of NTL's cable modems NTL now supplies all subscribers with cable modems.
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 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.
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 Xbox to the existing internet connection through a router or PC connected to their STB, if they fail to use the official registration process..