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Originally Posted by Pierre
When they bought the franchises they only had to cable a percentage of each franchise not all of it.
Then a few years ago the government said that they didn't have to cable any more if they didn't want to.
Why should they cable unprofitable small populated areas - which is virtually all that is left now.
When the time is right and they have the capitial I'm sure they will start up a limited build program.
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Unprofitable areas are not the only ones left, I'm sure any employee or ex-employee in the know in other areas of the country could tell you similar to what I know about the old franchise area that I worked in.
The government only stopped pushing them to meet the targets because thyey knew it was impossible to enforce them to be met, many areas in the South Wales franchise have fibre for business and universities etc with spare capacity but have never been cabled for residential use. Some of these areas even have ducting in place around residential streets that were put in place as long ago as 1995-96 by CableTel, these areas remain untouched with a lot of wastd cash already sitting in the ground.
There are many stories of bad management when discussing network build, like the industrial unit that ntl bought in Bridgend! they had fibre running through Bridgend between Cardiff and Swansea but some bafoon bought a building that was nowhere near this fibre and totally in the wrong place for cabling the town anyway, they eventually sold the building after about 5 years, they had paid rates on it for this period and there was a big laugh locally when they couldn't find the key to let the estate agents in to view the property, as they had not set foot in the building in the five years that they had owned it.
SMHarman talked about sharing poles etc, ntl aquired a lot of old overhead networks in South Wales with very good customer penetration. These people were paying lots of money for 13 or so analogue channels, and the South Wales valley areas have always been know to be where the money is for CATV services, as people tend to stay in to watch a video etc instead of having a trip to the local wine bar like they do in the cities.
ntl closed these systems including an 860MHz Broadband system, and many of them had ntl fibre trunks a reasonably close distance away. ntl then started playing around with MVDS microwave video distribution systems in South Wales, that went nowhere so they then played with wireless broadband WHAM in South Wales, we all know what happened to that one.
They then played about with a 3G distribution system that failed because the operators wanted to use ntl's systems in London and this was the area that ntl didn't want them near because the build quality is so bad, and it would be a nightmare in terms of cost and managing to pu it right.
The reason behind all the failures has been employing the wrong people and lack of cash, the cash was short long before the general public or CSA realised.
ntl have been strapped for cash for years, too much money was wasted early on and thats the bottom line.
