Where NTL failed
 

In comparing NTL to telewest vast differences can be spotted.

1 - NTL use india call centre's, telewest is all in UK.
2 - Telewest announced all analogue areas to be upgraded in short time period, NTL have no plans.
3 - Telewest do speed upgrades in much shorter time.
4 - Telewest provide higher top speed and higher upload.
5 - Telewest have no cap.
6 - Telewest have no admin fee to upgrade.

So why such a difference? Well I think NTL have gone on too long with prices too low on the bottom tier and now they charge 37.99 for their top tier, this has left them needing to do crazy things such as outsource tech support and add traffic caps to maintain profits and keep their network together, upgrades are done years too late and customers suffer. Telewest charge £50 for their top tier which gives them more turnover and they keep their customers happy reducing customer turnover, this in turn has kept them in better shape. NTL should work on the law of averages, charge more and remove caps, the average use will remain steady but they get more turnover and keep customers happy, the extra turnover can bring back outsourced work and pay for upgrade's on their network, analogue base pack is cheaper then digital base pack further reducing their turnover, also customer complaints are high forcing them to give out discounts. Am I the only one thinking this.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Surely most of this philiophising is irrelevant in the light of an imminant merger... plus, are we actually achieving anything worthwhile by complaining to each other about things which are largely out of our hands?

Regardless of the amount of people that may agree with your point of view.. is it really worth the effort?

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Telewest are so perfect are they?

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Telewest_Bluey...Review_5427928

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Think i can answer this one for the Telewest are gods brigade.

Are but this is a one off for Telewest. NTL do it all the time Honest :disturbd:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

The biggest flaw in this argument is that ntl users cannot use Telewest services. Comparing ntl to networks operating in the same area is possibly a better topic for discussion, although a personal yawn as far as I am concerned.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Does scare me a bit how Telewest were operating profitably before ntl as well as pushing the services envelope more. Had Telewest bought C+W this would be very different, trust me.
All moot anyway as previously mentioned, Telewest aren't going to be buying ntl any time soon, and any merger would have ntl as the dominant partner (I'm afraid).
Tell you what, let's compare ntl to BT instead, where exchanges are being enabled for ADSL late due to core network upgrades being needed (not enough bandwidth) and 10% of their exchanges are operating at an oversubscribed level shall we?

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Congratulations Captain Obvious!!

NTL users using Telewest services isn't being discussed here, what is being discussed is why couldn't NTL operate in a similar way.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

neither company are operating at a profit, and ntls revenues are much larger that Telewests, as you would expect.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Operating profitably I said, operating profit and net profit are two very different things, both companies are actually operating profitably.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I don't see how you can compare the two really. The history and structure & size of their respective networks are totally different.

Here's one thing they have in common - they both went under a major finance restructure.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I also believe that they partner in the Front Row program?

Thanks for the title Poolking, I may use that in my signature :)

Re: Where NTL failed
 

As possibly the only person on this board who uses both NTL and Telewest services on a regular basis, I'm in a unique position to comment.

And the verdict is... it's a draw. There are some little things I prefer on Telewest, some little things I prefer on NTL, but when it comes down to it, the two services are near enough identical as far as the end user is concerned.

I have to say that I find the constant pointing at Telewest as an example of "how things should be done" rather amusing. Right, Telewest had their speed upgrades completed sooner, but NTL said Q1 2004, and they haven't missed the deadline yet. And that's completely missing the point anyway, which is that for the same cost per month, your broadband will be twice as fast on NTL as it is on Telewest. It's funny how the pro-TW brigade always fail to mention that one.

Re. upload: when I had NTL's 300k service, my upload was twice as fast as the upload I now have on Telewest's 256k service.

Furthermore, my TW internet connection has a "usage guideline" that is actually more stringent that NTL's for the equivalent speed (not that I care about either, frankly).

Please, people, stop thinking Telewest are the best thing ever. They're just the same as NTL when it comes down to it.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Nice to see a well balanced post on this subject :tu:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Having recently switched from NTL to TW, I would agree with that. The major difference imo is that the email on Telewest works. And the fact that I get one bill for all my services.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Sorry about that, I was feeling a little grumpy, so went for a walk to clear my head. :D

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I forgot to mention telewest dont force transperent proxies as well.

Actually there are many things ntl and telewest have in common.

They both provide cable tv,phone and internet
They both were in financial trouble.
They both have the same cable market dominance in their areas.

If there was a merger I dread to think what would happen, because they are so different from each other.

Twice the speed for the same price? where did that come from.

I would rather pay more for a higher quality service then pay less for an inferior service, its quite a simple view. Luckily my landlord has caved in and although I will be paying more rent and paying for BT to install a line next may I will be moving to uk online for internet (8mbit ADSL 500 gig traffic 39.99 a month) BT for phone (10.50 a month line rental £3 inclusive calls) and sky digital tv (6.50 for family pack more then 6x the channels I have now). I bet I am not the only one who has been fighting to leave ntl.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Where do you get those prices from? :confused:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Umm quite :confused:

£10.50 for BT line rental yes...........ÂÂà ƒâ€šÃ‚£3 calls NO just 5.5p an hour in the evening and weekend.

Sky for £6.50 eh? We would all be on it if it were that cheap! Last time I looked it was £19.50, probably soon due for the annual or bi-annual price rise from Sky. As for more channels.......'most' of them are tripe and shopping.

8Mb ADSL from UK Online........you need to be 2Km from the excahange, and subject to high line quality to get this. It will work best if the exchange is your next door neighbour. Speeds are up to 8Mbs, it will be interesting to see how it performs...........or doesnt when all the lunatics who insist on downloading 165Gb a day sign up to it.......the pipes will congest quickly to say the very least.

Also worth noting BT and Sky are far from the perfect companies some try and paint a picture of them. I would much rather have the services I have now that what I had before.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Well the BT line rental part is OK.

Aside from that I make the Sky Family pack £19.50 a month and the 1st BT together package (option 2) as being £6.00 a month.

Not sure about the ADSL but it looks about what I'd expect.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

:rofl:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I can't work out whether this is sarcasm or not?

£25pm will get you 1Mbit with Telewest, but 2Mbit with NTL (from next year).

Re: Where NTL failed
 

What a completely stupid topic **yawn** not another telewest vs. ntl topic.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

i agree.
the two companies are going to merge in a few months, like it or not. telewest have now finished their refinancing
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/041221/215498_1.html
and ntl will soon finalise the selling off of the broadcast division.
ntl will have more control over the merged company, because it's a larger company - twice as large as telewest.

so soon, ntl and tw customers will have the best (and worse :( ) of both worlds! :disturbd:

:)

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I made mistake I meant the base sky pack equivelent to ntl base pack, doesnt include uk gold and other premier family channels.

I got the prices from ringing them up, this is pretty much planned out now I plan to change over towards the end of april.

After a merger I would expect telewest areas to stay the same and ntl areas to stay the same, ntl will make excuse down to local competition, and telewest call centres will be closed down with india taking over :(

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I would say if they told you any pack was £6.50 they are BSing you.

The Sky Equivilent to the ntl Base Pack is the Value pack which is rubbish, It doesnt even include the freeview channels and costs £13.50

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Hey come on now SKY never give out wrong information :rolleyes:

:LOL:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

There seems to be an increase in the amount of people swearing even though the censor kicks in but the intention to swear is still implied. This will cease please.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Have edited my post

Re: Where NTL failed
 

...and even the 'first month half price' offer only applies to packages at £19.50 and above!

Re: Where NTL failed
 

:LOL:

No No! Of course not! The Sun shines out of Skys Proverbial Ass :D ;)

Im looking forward to the snow over christmas anyway, at least my TV viewing will be uninterrupted, and I wont need to keep a brush near my TV

:rofl:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

They will never let you get away without Sky World either.........they will keep pestering you to you bow to submission.

Still each to their own :)

The only way I can see it be cheaper is if the landlord pays it.....which I would doubt.

When you consider you Have to have a phoneline with Sky to make use of the 'Free' Install and Box for 12 months anyway, and you the minimum you can pay BT regardless of whether you actually use your phone or if you use a much cheaper CPS or Indirect provider is £10.50, As a general rule it costs more.

Still if you cant live without hundreds of shopping channels and 'Bobs Artistic Toe Clippings' type channels for special interests fair enough.....the choice is yours.

Id rather have the quality channels and VOD than having to sift through acres of pointless junk.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

this isn't about money, I will be spending more, for the switch, increased rent, line installation, 39.99 on the net instead of 37.99. It is about quality of service and having what I want. Sky offered me £6.50 per month I got no idea of this is a special offer or not but it is the price I was quoted, but even at £13 per month I would take it, as right now I have analogue tv which is abysmal, I get regular interference and every year ntl reduce the channels I can no longer get premiership plus for example. Other problems I have had are the waiting for Leics resegmentation reducing my internet performance to poor level's and having to put up with india call centres. Some people may accept a poor service and put up with it whilst others wont, I am one of the ones who wont, if ntl wont change then I will.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Not a problem, I'd imagine this time of year would make grumps out of the most placid of souls :):)

Walking is good, I plan on doing more myself, really need to loose some weight :)

Sorry Mods, a tad off topic............so here we go, ntl, telewest, ntl, telewest :):)

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Sky and BT both have nice call centres in Bangalore too. I really wouldnt count on their service being better or anything special.

The £13.50 package on Sky is a huge waste of money look at the channels:

http://www.sky.com/ordersky/channelpackages/valuepack

I would prefer Analogue or Freeview and Top Up TV!

The Family Pack is the the first worthwhile package and that is £19.50

http://www.sky.com/ordersky/channelpackages/familypack

Re: Where NTL failed
 

In the ideal world the merged company would use the good bits from each company and throw away the bad bits, Unfortunately we have ego and politics to consider!

I can only comment on one division of ntl, thats the Home division and the part dealing with headends, switches and networks that supply services to the customers. I think this is the core part of the home division, and it's never focused on. Whilst Sales, retentions, customer care, tech support, billing etc all pat themselves on the back these guys in the front line are always overlooked.

When you go a bit further up the ladder in the original ntl areas and their central/corporate support roles, you used to find quite a few ex-Telewest employees. I know of one such a person who is currently and quite rightly a very concerned person, he was disposed of by Telewest because he wasn't seen as being upto the job. He moved into a position with ntl and has flourished in the companies alternative "engineering focus" to the one in Telewest. His old boss who disposed of him at Telewest, has also flourished into a very senior position so it's obvious the guy is quite rightly worried.

Purely looking at things from a technical/engineering angle, I think the merger could be the time when some people are "found out" It would be good for the company if politics and looking after friends were put to one side, and when the disposals start and the music stops decisions on who stays and who goes out of each company are made on merit.

Oh to live in an ideal world. :D

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Trifling flaw here - those parts are run by ntl:networks.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I was thinking about regional, wind the clock on a number of months and they will probably be back under home again!

Regional networks were not networks (see if that makes any sense) when I left ntl. Someone decided that the guys looking after networks couldn't be called networks! :D It made very little sense but was all part of someones empire building/strenghtening.

All ntl organisational information has historically been very much out of date within the average 18 month re-org period. if "some" of the management put as much effort into making improvements as they do building empires and barriers, ntl would be a far better company for employee and customer.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Would be nice if they were, tbh. But they aren't, strangely enough someone decided that being in charge of a network they should be under networks. Hey, ho, it doesn't matter where they are as long as they're under management who a) understand the nature of HFC networks and b) have a dependable wodge of cash for routine maintenance. IMHO judgement is reserved on this question. I'm surprised you hadn't heard about the change though, it was nearly a year ago, and Our Mutual Friends in South Wales certainly know about it.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

NTL = No Technology Lately

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I read somewhere that Telewest are implementing DOCSIS 2. Are NTL doing the same i wonder. I doubt it since NTL are struggling to keep their network up while Telewest are constantly improving their network with the implementation of DOCSIS 2 which will allow for better speeds and better service all round.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Really? I hadn't heard that, but a bit of googling threw up this, which isn't exactly conclusive:
http://www.unitedforums.co.uk/vb/arc...hp/t-5624.html

TW aren't even able to use EuroDOCSIS, owing to a lot of their modems being DOCSIS only - 1/3 of ntl's UBRs are ED (the other 2/3 being that large partly because they're DOCSIS only).

Implementing DOCSIS 2.0 isn't an easy option, but a fair chunk of ntl's equipment is *already* DOCSIS 2.0 compliant, all the latest Ambits are, for instance. Also DOCSIS 1.1 kit is available in higher capacities and that *is* being rolled out now (in fact there's loads of it about now).

Drop in at my desk sometime and sign an NDA and I'll tell you ;)

Re: Where NTL failed
 

I agree that it doesn't matter who's running the show, as long as they understand. There has to be a dividing line between responsibilities because things are obviously too big for one department to look after things.
There are big pros and cons whoever look after the HFC networks, the "network" type managers are generally technical and apart from the ex-SDH type understand the need for maintenance, these type are genarally not 100% customer focused though.
The Home/CS type are generally 100% customer focused but have little regard for maintenance and the affect of taking network technicians off the network to run around after individual customer faults, These individual faults are often larger faults affecting a larger area.

Our mutual friends in South Wales mention a lot of things about goings on in ntl, they probably did mention the change. I tend not to ask about organisational changes as things are changing on a weekly basis, I know regions have changed and the South Wales guys are back under one of the other regions that they were attached to a few years ago, this change happened a number of months ago.

They were telling me last week about tracking serious fraud problems, problems where someone from corporate engineering has been to oversee level adjustment for US and caused distortion by overdriving equipment with the wrong levels. (Apparently stems from the senior corporate engineers who don't know how to measure QPSK)

They were also mentioning the current problems with receiving and booking faults for the network, apparently there was huge problems after the last re-org and just as things were settling down they now have to deal with a different set of people to process the faults. Engineers now have about six different phone numbers to call depending on what they want to process. An engineer could be working on Res faults or Network, to add compliactions there are different numbers for clearing off faults, requesting faults, and referring faults to networks. I was told it took one of my friends nearly an hour to make 4 phone calls to book off faults, refer a fault and get his afternoon calls.

I guess they will get over these problems in time, and when they get the system functioning correctly we all know what they will do.

Change it! :rolleyes:

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Nearly all the modems NTL and Telewest supply are Docsis 2 compliant as they can be flashed to docsis 2 if they havent already been done. Its a matter of network being upgraded. you say that NTL have already DOCSIS 2 compliant equipment. Do u mean equipment as in the modems or the network as a whole? I dont think NTL have yet to implement DOCSIS 2 other than in the modems which Telewest are doing anyway. The only difference is that Telewest dont have as many problems as NTL so in my opinion NTL will be deploying DOCSIS 2 much later than Telewest since NTL must first sort out their current problems before they move on.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

The modems. AFAIK neither TW nor ntl are installing DOCSIS 2.0 capable CMTS, but that's in many respects the easy bit, it's replacing hundreds of thousands of CPE that costs, which is why Telewest and original ntl has only DOCSIS levels of speed, while the ex-C&W areas of ntl where we had the foresight to specify dual-standards can accomodate both.

Are you saying that the TW modems such as the Scientific Atlanta Webstar my Mum has is capable of DOCSIS 2.0 operation with a simple firmware upgrade? I don't.

I believe Mum has a DPX100 or DPX110 (installed mid-2003), but the first SA modem capable of DOCSIS 2.0 is the EPC2100 (certified December 2003 and AFAIK not deployed on BY yet, they certainly only have USB drivers for the 100 and 110 on their website). I'd be surprised if BY has the installed user base of DOCSIS 2.0 compliant modems ntl has had since the introduction of the Ambit 200 over a year ago. So I'll stick my neck out and say ntl has more DOCSIS 2.0 compliant devices than BY as of now.

Remember DOCSIS 2.0 requires both enough compliant modems and the head-end equipment replaced, which isn't a trivial job for either firm. BY may get there first owing to having a smaller network and thus less work to do (60% of the size, roughly), but ntl are probably ahead on DOCSIS 2.0 compliance.

Re: Where NTL failed
 

Blueyonder use Motorola Surfboard modems which are DOCSIS 2.0 compliant. I have sitting in front of me a SB5100 and i know for certain thats DOCSIS 2.0 compliant. Those old modems may have not been DOCSIS 2.0 compliant but any new modem Blueyonder install certainly is. Ive had BLueyonder installed at two homes. The first one of mines was installed 2 years ago and they installed a SB4200 which is DOCSIS 1 but now they are installing DOCSIS 2.0 modems. A few friends of mines have also signed up to blueyonder and have got DOCSIS 2.0 compliant modems. I havent heard as yet to whether NTL are doing this for certain so i don't see how NTL could be ahead of Blueyonder in terms of DOCSIS 2.0 deployment.