18 
US billionaire John Malone, head of international cable TV company Liberty Global, is looking to buy Virgin Media. The now-profitable TV and broadband company is said to be valued at around the £15bn mark.
Things are looking rosy for Virgin elsewhere, too. It’s latest set of financial numbers show it took £699m in revenues in the year ending last December, up from 2011′s £540m. It also managed to increase its customer base by 88,700 in the last year, as speed-crazed internet users signed up for its ever-fatter cable-based internet pipes.
According to the FT, Malone sees himself as something of a rival to Sky boss and unofficial king of the UK TV supply chain Rupert Murdoch, so here’s hoping we see some super-aggressive price-cutting action once the deal’s done. [FT via BBC]
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Well the deal is subject regulatory approval but it does appear to be going ahead! Virgin Media will be the largest company in the Liberty Global group, they current have no UK operations as such but have Ireland and European companies.
Liberty just bought Virgin media for 23.3 billions! breaking news!
Now I hope they put my TV package down a bit
Now they’re making money, can they please fit cable to my area. Please!
Exactly! They need to lay more pipe, if they want more punters.
My home is 10 years old and there is no cable in the area.
Unlikely to happen unless you move to a new build as thats where most new cable laying is done. The majority of VM’s debt is a hangover from NTL and Telewest aggressive cable laying and actually there is a figure of 8 across the country of fibre access. Shame it misses out a lot of us!
My house is only 7 years old and I moved from a now 11 year old house half a mile away that had cable fitted. The stupid c**ts didn’t bother extending the cable to the new part of the estate. I was shocked when I rang (then) NTL and asked them to move my service over! I really couldn’t believe they didn’t fit cable to all new builds – it must be staggeringly cheap to do in comparison to having to dig up already established areas!
They pretty much stopped cabling 7 or 8 years ago when their debt problems reached a head, which was at the time the cable companies merged with virgin mobile / virgin.net.
They’re only doing little bits here and there these days, which is a right pain in the arse for those of us buying new build houses. And those of us who live in towns where BT cannot be arsed to upgrade the exchange to support fibre
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2012/10/uk-top-5-largest-bt-telephone-exchanges-still-without-superfast-broadband.html
Not quite at the cant be arsed stage yet. The roll out is progressing and will continue to do so until well into 2014 but You can’t seriously expect them to cable up every telephone exchange and cabinet simultaneously, It’s already one of the largest civil engineering projects in europe.
Well, now they’re making a profit and the Americans buying them up, they might start laying cable in quantity again – especially with BT (eventually) upgrading their network, although they’ve delayed out local exchange box for over 18 months now!
Lol my home is 3.5 yrs old, and there is virgin cable 10m away from my street (which is an extension to another), but for some reason they thought its not worth investing to this new street with 100+ homes (flats+houses)…
The virgin keeps sending me leaflets like how good their cable is, and i have virgin in the area so i may have one, but when i call and give them my address they say no chance! It requires 100s of 1000s of £££ they say… Well genius guys at work
I say there is 100+ possible homes/customers as the internet sux in the new street (due to indirect distance to exchange is 3 times longer than the direct distance) and they say they are around the corner but refuse to invest for laying/extending ~100m additional cable…
Plus the backhaul. Can’t just wack another 100 subs on an already stressed backhaul network, not and keep up the pretense of high speeds.
Aware of that, but more customers means more bread
since they are continuously investing in their infrastructure for increasing speed, somebody needs to feed on those. You dont just invest all the time w/o bringing more customers…
Yeah backhaul is an issue but getting you are not going to get 100 customers at the same time… It will be there eventually gradually…
Real problem is before the constructions started they could invest little to extend to the end of the street, but now construction finished and requires 10times more investment. However they still want me in and hassling me every month to sell me virgins
but they dont wanna give me the virgins i want, they wanna give the non virgin service which i m already getting…
It’s a lot more than you seem to think even before the streets finished, plus they need developer permission which often isn’t forthcoming,
It may be a lot but not as much as after the buildings are finished street is flattened!
Besides why wouldnt the developer accept it? It is additional extra selling point, look our properties have cable/fiber as well?
So your point is it is not worth it because it is a lot of hassle? How about how are they going to expand if they dont reach to more people? Just overselling their products like SKY does?
At the construction stage, there may be political hassle to over come but not as much as once finished.
Because it’s not really a sellinbg point, almost nobody ever asks and it’s one more bunch of muppets getting in their way for something they see no value in. My point is it’s not cost effective in a lot of places even at the slightly cheaper cost when the developers are still building. You may have 100 potential customers but chances are you only get 10 of them or even 20 and they eventually pay back the outlay in 30 years or so. BT wouldnt even do it everywhere if they didn’t have a universal service obligation.
I couldnt disagree more about selling point. I know at least 10 people out of the 100+ who would love to get cable in this area for example. True that nobody buys house because there is cable there, but it is an extra selling point nonetheless,and just because you think it is not a selling point doesnt mean it is not.
And since you dont know the area i live in, you dont know how crap internet people are getting, and i can only assume (because 10 of 10 i know said it straight that they would switch, so assume many people would too) that many people would love to switch to cable from crap adsl that doesnt work properly in long distances.
I think you are also underestimating the cost of bare ground installation vs finished street where all the BT equipment layered along with gas/electricity/water and obvious ground decorations trees/grass/bushes/garden walls/drive ways etc surface structures.
So you are saying they wouldnt do it because it will not pay back in 30 yrs? Because they layed their previous infrastructure to pay back over night?
Also the previous street leading to the new extension is only 10-15 yrs old and it has about 200 homes or less not greatly different, but still layed cables about ~100m or so by NTL, i guess they were dumb to make an investment like that who knows…
No, they laid their previous infrastructure and came within a hair of going bust. That’s why they are so cautious now, and as it happens Im not guessing or estimating.
Apart from with the selling point comment when I am sort of guessing, I’m extrapolating from what I know which is that nobody ever takes any notice of phone lines, they just assume it will all work until they find out it doesn’t. I’ve been to houses where they hadn’t even cabled for BT let alone virgin and everyone without fail thinks it will just have been done automatically,
“No, they laid their previous infrastructure and came within a hair of going bust”
That is because just investing without care? and cant be attributed to wrong management decisions?
If you invest and dont provide any value to attract new customers, then obviously you started with a failure in mind not success…
They can still lay infrastructure, and they can do surveys before they start doing it, and see if it would worth it or not, but nope! Thats the kind of attitude/decision making that make businesses going bust!
In any average street, there will be about 100 homes or less, do you think all are getting virgin? esp when they are within bt infinity range or more reliable service.
Investing where you can grab customers more probable than investing near highly competitive area? Which one has the more chance of success and failure?
I am talking about housing complex that is 10-15m distance to their cable box, which is not invested, not some housing area on top of Mount Everest mate, I dont think you are making any valuable comment, your info based on their failure, but you dont really know why they failed unless you were part of the management teams that were failing, which then explains why it was failing probably.
j/k
Same here
“Need to lay more pipe”
ermm.. awkward
I’m getting ready to jump ship then lol.
depends how the service alters. virgin are very good when there is a problem and to be honest i hate murdoch so try to avoid sky. although i do have sky sports HD via virgin.