The History of cable TV in the uk
I thought this was interesting.
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Blokes, obviously :Peace:
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I enjoyed it matey!!!
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Re: The History of cable TV in the uk
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Why comment on it if it has no interest to you? Why even look at the topic? :rolleyes: |
Re: The History of cable TV in the uk
This should move to the ntil.info site IMHO. I've seen it before, either on someones web site or .com. Thinking about it, it must have been a web site as there were pictures of the old Bristol Cables.
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So why comment on why did I comment? :) |
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Well i thought it was interesting also, nice find. :)
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I found it very interesting and will have a good look at that site.
Rediffusion were called British Cable TV by the time that I joined them back in 1987 they had a few name changes and were part of the BET group of companies. They were bought by Robert Maxwell around that time who asset stripped the company, I am not sure of the full details but he paid say £1M for the entire company and sold one of the buildings for around £750K shortly after. Maxwell sold parts of the company ie: Guildford and Cardiff to Insight communications. When Maxwell died there was a management takeover and the company changed name from Maxwell Cable to Metro Cable, the directors paid less than £1M for the company from the administrators and sold half of the company around 3 years later to CableTel who then bought ntl and used the ntl name. To put th ntl history into context, the broadcast side used to be the "Home Office" before it was privatised by Maggie, and the Residential cable side was owned by the parent company Ocom communications in the states, they formed Insight communications over here and later changed the name to CableTel, when CableTel bought NTL they used the name but changed it soon after to ntl. I was told that the first Cable TV system was in the Rhondda valley! I have also worked on the old system in Bristol, mainly at the headend they had with the pair of 3.7M dishes when they were running programs like Music Box, the original Sky channel and movies on tapes a few years before Astra 1 was put into orbit. The old Rediffusion company also had an interactive system back in the 80's and an 860MHz broadband system in the Rhondda in the very early 90's, some of the shestring stuff we did was way ahead of ntl including the VOIP telephone trials we were doing. It's a pity things didn't work out differently because being bought by the Americans ie: ntl/CableTel actually stopped a lot of development in this country and put us back many years. :eek: |
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The ntl company which CableTel bought was born out of the privatisation of the IBA. The old IBA became the independent ITV companies, the Radio Authority and ntl. ntl were the engineering side of the IBA. ntl also bought up the home office radcoms when they were sold off.
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I also had involvement with work for the Home office just before and about the time they became NTL, I should of also mentioned about Crawley Court, NTL was a very professional organisation back in those days it's no wonder many of the people from the Broadcast division I met when at ntl would look own their noses as all the people from the cable side. Many of them resented being bought out by a bunch of cowboys. I also worked for Rediffusion Radio systems also known as Redifon, I dont suppose many know of the varied involvements that Rediffusion had with technology in those days. Redif Flight Simulators, Redif Computers, Redif Audio systems and Rediffusion Radio supplying and servicing two-way radio equipment for marine use. I worked on VHF and HF radio equip for navy ships and they also built some very early Satellite Navigation equipment that I worked on, it was getting fairly old by the time I was involved in it. Rediffusion was a company with fingers in every pie, as well as cable TV they had the TV rental business that they sold to Granada. They made the classic mistake of letting the financial people take control of the company, one day they looked around and realised they were sitting on a lot of old technology because they were not investing in the future. The network just fell to pieces as they cut all maintenance and engineers to concentrate on maximising return from as little expenditure as possible, it worked for a few years and then bit them on the bum! |
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Is there any news about History of Cable in UK and about ntl, Telewest etc. ??
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Two weeks old. Anything in particular you want to know? Nothing really has changed in the last two weeks.
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Here is the list of Cable operators as it was in the 1990's.
Aberdeen Cable Aberdeen (No Longer exists) Andover Cablevision Andover Anglia Cable Harlow (Telewest) Birmingham Cable Birmingham (Telewest) Cable Corporation Windsor (Telewest) Cable London North London (Telewest) Cable Midlands Wolverhampton (NTL) Cable North West Liverpool (NTL) CableTel Surrey and Hants, West Central Scotland, South Wales, Beds and Herts, Kirklees, & Nothern Ireland. (NTL) Cablevision Bedfordshire: South Bedfordshire (NTL) Cambridge Cable: Cambridge (NTL) Coventry Cable: Coventry& Midlands (NTL) Diamond Cable: Midlands&Nottingham (NTL) Metro Cable: Welwyn Garden city (NTL) Norwich Cablevision: Norwich,Norfolk (NTL) Encom: Tower Hamlets (NTL) Bell Cable Media: Watford,Herts (NTL) LCC Cable: Leicester (NTL) NYNEX CableVision: Bromley,Derby,Solent,Sussex.(NTL) NYNEX CableVision: Blackburn,Darwen & Bolton.(NTL) Peterborough Cablevision: Peterborough (NTL) Swindon Cable: Swindon,Wiltshire (Telewest) Telecential: Hemel Hempstead,Northants. (NTL) Telecential: Reading and Bracknell (Telewest???) United Artists: Avon,Croydon,Cotswolds,Dundee (Telewest) United Artists: Edinburgh,London South,Glenrothes (Telewest) United Artists: South East,North East,Motherwell (Telewest) United Artists: Newcastle,perth (Telewest) BT Cable: Westminster and Milton Keynes. (NTL) Videotron: Southampton (NTL) Videotron: Middlesex, south London (NTL) NYNEX: Middlesex (NTL) Yorkshire Cable: Bradford,Leeds (Telewest) North Downs Cablevision: Crawley,Sussex (Telewest Eurobell) Devon Cablevision: Devon&Somerset(Telewest Eurobell) East Kent Cablevision: Eastern kent(Telewest Eurobell) Cable companies after 1995: OMNE-UK: North West England and parts of Scotland.(Now WightCable North) Wight Cable: Covers Isle of wight and former OMNE areas. Kingston Comms: Telecoms provider for Kingston upon hull now operates Cable Services. Atlantic Cable: Formerly Aberdeen Cable, Atlantic telecom assets was sold to Opal Telecom except Atlantic Cable, Atlantic Cable went into liquidation together with Atlantic Telecom possibly in 1997. Company name changes: United Artists: changed to Telewest Communications Westminster Cable: Changed to BT Cable Cable Tel: changed to NTL Aberdeen Cable: Atlantic Cable Devon Cablevision: Eurobell South west. East kent Cablevision: Eurobell South East North downs Cablevision: Eurobell South east. NYNEX,Videotron,BellCable media,Mercury all merged creating CWC. Cablevision Bedfordshire: Cable Tel. Other Telecom company name changes: Mercury Communications: Cable and Wireless Communications. (1997) Cellnet: BT Cellnet (1999) IPM: Infolines Public Networks (2000) New World payphones: NWP Spectrum (2002) BT Internet: BT openworld (2000) BT paging,Cellnet,Genie: O2 (2002) One2One: T-Mobile (2002) Dolphin Telecom: Inquam NTL Broadcast: Arquiva (2005) Vizzavi: Vodafone Live! (2003) Mercury paging: Page One Infolines Public Networks/Central payphones: 4 Kiosk Solutions (2005) Guernsey Telecoms: Cable and Wireless Guernsey(2001) Infolines premier: Premier Tele-solutions (2001) MCI: MCI-Worldcom (1998) Value Telecom: Fresh Mobile (2002) Quote:
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