Sorry to hear about your friend OB. Medical Negligence is horrible. My sister nearly died because our GP wouldn't pay for an MRI scan..

As to paying for interactive..

Logically, everyone does pay for it (indirectly), but it is not a separate billed item, so NTL don't charge extra for it.

Also, technically, you could argue that since the BBC provided both Wimbledon and the Open, you pay for it through the Licence Fee, not your NTL subscription.

Hopefully this will all be irrelevant in a couple of months anyway, when NTL get round to downloading the software for the boxes..

BTW OB, apart from the sorry bit at the top, none of this was directed at you..

Nothing is free! Certainly not with ntl:. The point being made is ... everyone pays the same for digital tv... but some do not get the same service or availability of enhancements.
It's a bit like say.... you buy a car in Manchester and pay £20,000 for it - it has the lot..... air con etc etc.... But if you lived say in Lambeth, South London, and paid the same, but had no air conditioning, electric windows, power steering, and the engine only went at a tenth of the speed of what you would get if you bought it in Manchester, you wouldn't be too happy if someone told you... Oh.. the big engines are free, and so is the power steering , electric windows etc. etc. - to those most everywhere in the country, but if you happen to live in certain parts of London and still pay the same money... well... tough!
Maybe you should chill out and try and understand what really is ****ing people off about ntl: instead of talking crap in its defence.

:2up:

Like the analogy, but thats not quite true is it.

Broadband is a paid option in Manchester or London (where availible).

If you cannot get Digital, but only analogue you pay less.

So if your on digital and do not have the latest software it is not like saying you don't have aircon power steering a lower powered engine.

You still get the same primary tv content delivered in a virtually identical manner, you just dont get eTV.

More like saying you get climate control on your Manchester car and Air con on your London car.

Diggin up a reasonably old post here! :)

ADSL does count as part of your line rental, as you are required to have a BT line for it to function properly.

ie you can argue that the cost of an ADSL line is £9.99 (not sure on correct figures) plus the £20 odd that you pay to your ISP.

ADSL is supplied over your copper line, so therefore it can be argued that you pay for it through that!

M@

Call Minder
Call Waiting and all other options work in the same manner.

You do not have to pay for ADSL so it is not part of you BT phone line bill. BT cannot cross subsidise so the phone line bill cannot contribute to the ADSL service.

This is not an argument.:shrug:

NTL can provide all cabled customers with digital tv picures (paid for service one), telephone (paid for service 2)

Some customers can get broadband (paid for service 3) and enhancedTV (no cost service.

BT can provide a phone line to all customers (paid for service) and ADSL to some customers (paid service).

The only thing that might be 'free' is CR3 and that is because they are in the middle of roll out.

I need to chill out??? :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

:rolleyes:

He has a good point you need to take other peoples views seriously:D

Im not talking about the fact that ntl: are or are not charging you for interactive, the principle of that point is that BT can take 5 - 15 years upgrading everyones exchange to be ADSL enabled (by which time ADSL will be old hat) WITH massive financial help from the UK goverment yet you won't allow ntl: just a year or two to upgrade your half of the network? Now who is exagerating, expecting ntl: to upgrade a network that covers half of the UK in just a year! :rolleyes:

You wanna talk about old technology, BT were given the option 15 years ago to upgrade their network in preparartion for future high bandwidth services but they never! :mad:

Oh well, like i said in an earlier post. you really should go work for NTL.....

At the age of 17 you have the ability to spout profounded crap oh so well.... keep it up, you never know you may be running NTL in a month or 2 ;) :D

you keep up you crap. For someone who supposedly runs a busines, the fact that you dont know much about well documented recession in the US market and the big slump of the telecommunications industry a few years shows me that maybe you need to go back to school :D :upyours:

There's another of those blanket comments which offends ntl employee's.

Rapidly losing patience with this site and its one track mind.

BT gets no financial help from the government that NTL doesn't (ie investment reliefs etc). BT is not a government body and gets no subsidy from the government.

Its a good thing that BT didn't upgrade for high bandwidth 15 years ago. Think how poor that technology would be compared to today. 15 years ago BT did upgrade to digital exchanges and make massive infrastructure improvements over the exchange and trunk network. They have never changed the pair to home though. Think 15 years ago there was no call waiting, caller ID, call minder (voicemail), three way calling, call divert. All these things have come from upgrading to digital exchanges.

In fact I think 15 years ago we were still using pulse dialing over much of the network. Do you remember how long it took to dial numbers with lots of 0's?

BT may not recieve much help now, but they did

BT got a network that was built with taxpayer's money, and large parts of that network were upgraded with digital exchanges before BT was privatised. The post office were upgrading to digital exchanges about 15 years before there telecoms department was split off and privatised. Admittedly, this was mainly around major ciities, and BT have done a lot of work since then.

The various cable companies had protection from competition while installing their own networks (still do to some extent) but I don't think they ever recieved as much help as BT.

Anyway, to bring this back on topic, I thought Proppin' said that the network was ready for e-TV, but they were just waiting for the software download to the boxes?

Sorry to take it off topic for a final post, but NTL et als mistake when bidding for franchises was missing the point that the cables had to be burried not strung (like BTs) therefore costing a whole lot more to put in place, thus the infrastructure build was going to pretty much bankrupt any company IMHO.

Most large infrastructure projects are very poor payers for the initial investor. The Channel Tunnel, the Railways, CATV networks, fibre layers. All have a massive future benefit to society, but the people that built them did not do so well.

I'm going to read post 1 again now.

But what you have to remember, when BT was sold into the private sector, it was (indirectly) the taxpayers that benefitted from the sale of shares, most of this went directly back into goverment coffers.