The network wasn't sold to Virgin Media and ntl did not own virtually all of it there was the small matter of Telewest.

Virgin's penetration in their passed areas is over 40%.

The major contributor to profitability was debt for equity swaps by ntl and Telewest erasing large proportions of their debt and the interest payments that were crippling them.

Neither VM nor anyone else will ever get exclusive rights to deploy NGA to an area that would be completely illegal.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

In terms of pricing what I was getting at was, we are turning a corner now in terms of speeds, a corner Virgin turned a while back but there is no increase in pricing, you can get FTTC products for virtually the same if not exactly the same price as regular ADSL.

That can't be good for investment

Exactly. As you say, the piggy backers hide behind BT and then virtually give the product away.

I cannot stand BT due to the appalling service I have received from them over the past few years, but you cannot expect them to invest for everybody elses gain.

We in Milton Keynes are stuck in a similar situation. The cable system is analogue and needs upgrading. The impass is who pays for it?

The simplistic over view is that Virgin lease the cable network from BT. They won't upgrade it until BT confirm the lease will be renewed in the future. In the meantime BT are rolling out FTTx services which undermines the ROI for a new cable system.

You can see both sides of the argument perfectly.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

I know exactly what DOCSIS is and the flavours it comes in, I'm saying in they could have done what they have done now a long time ago. The cabling was already in place.

DOCSIS didn't go over a shared ~50Mbit pipe downstream and 27Mbit upstream until 2008. VM had several issues to cope with including fibre not being deep enough into the network and a lack of optical and RF capacity upstream. In the case of my local area and some others they actually have to swap out amplifiers and nodes within cabinets to allow for the 5Mbps upstream on 50Mbps let alone higher.

Upstream bonding which would allow for considerably higher bandwidths has only even more recently been released by Virgin's hardware vendors.

Yep.... such is this cut throat industry.

BT have rightly or wrongly already priced FTTC very very low to compete with existing Virgin and LLU products.

Whether other ISP's rebrand BT's FTTC or put in their own cabling/kit they will struggle to compete in terms of pricing, not because of some elevated duct sharing pricing because of the low prices being charged to the customer by all ISP's

Why have BT priced it so low? Because the rest of the market does and they want to get people on their new product. Its a vicious circle really

It matters not the exact sequance of consolidation that occured. It did consolidate & it has all pretty much ended up with Virgin Media.

What we do no is that the market has really failed in the UK with Broadband. Goverment attempts to get the market to work have failed. We have had almost no expansion of the Virgin network and BT have focussed on rollout to London & the South East. Varoius Government subsidised Broadband programes have been started hey are all very piecemeal and use different technolgies but all have had very limited sucess if any and have made almost no difference to availability

We are not talking about small very rural communties which will alway pose challanges but major towns and cities which BT is not rolling out to.

Whilst superficially BT can give the impression that availability of Broadband is good much of what is available is very much at the bottom end in the 3Mb to 6Mb range.

If BT is not willing to provide in acceptable timescales then the market has failed
The issue i if an incumbent operate with close to a monopoly is already there it makes competion very difficult. A competitor can invest heavilly to provide HS Broadband in an area only for BT to then move in which it can do quite quickly. THis can mean that the competors ROI is shot to pieces and it becomes a loss

If Virgin is in conjunction with a consortium to move into area BT ignores it will need some protection for a few years to enable it to get a return on its investment. This is allowed under EU rules

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

I know exactly what DOCSIS is and the flavours it comes in, I'm saying in they could have done what they have done now a long time ago. The cabling was already in place.

obviously you havent, docsis3 wasnt available a long time ago and thats needed at the very least probably for both 50mbit and 100mbit products and 30mbit would likely have run poorly on docsis1.

higher upload speeds need docsis2 and even for that to be rolled out work was required to improve the SNR in various areas.

of course even without all this taken into account do you think the amount of modems sharing each channel is the same as it was in the days when speeds were 0.5mbit.

Time warp time - circular discussions that resurface every few years are so much fun...

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

Who would want to use Virgin's own networks especially when its congested in that area (out on the street) in many areas.

Of course ISP's want to put in their own cables why do you think there's such a fuss from Virgin/Talk Talk about BT's duct rental pricing?

they making a fuss but I still dont think the cables will go in. At least not in many areas.

I bet Virgin would tho?

I see this as Virgin trying to get others on board in making a fuss so they are not the sole voice.

I see Virgin rolling out quite a bit, Sky doing some, TalkTalk doing very little if any

Who's talking about 3?

1 could do 40 down 10 up from the start?