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Originally Posted by Chrysalis
I would be interested to know how much actual cash was used for telewest and virgin, some say no real cash was involved others say it was, I find it hard to imagine how they can buy a company without using money. I would also be interested to know how they could be allowed to buy companies when they still have creditors to pay off and their network is close to potentially breaking broadcasting regulations when analogue gets switched off because they wont upgrade it, I would also be interested to hear what the eu regulator says about getting 0.5mbit on a 10mbit service is enough for them to fine ntl or something, I wont waste any time with ofcom they are useless when it comes to cable companies.
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Ok, I'll have a crack of this as I did mention it earlier.
I, like many ex-shareholders had money tied up in ntl/telewest. We had shares and we paid money for them. Those shares became worthless because the companies were in so much debt. So the American bond holders/banks took on this debt, several billion of it, for full control of ntl and telewest, then merged the companies together. So depending on how you look at it, either it cost the bondholders nothing or several billion. But no cash was handed over. There is no company that I know off that is in several billion pounds of debt. Just think what would happen if you didn't pay your mortgage, you'd lose your house. In this case, the cable networks would have collapsed. That's why the yanks did what they did. They control the UK cable industry that they had built and paid for in the first place and the price is they have taken on all the debt. Just imagine the interest payments on several billion pounds...
If the cable industy had been set up diffrently, this would not have happened. The Thatcher Government of the 1980's gave licences to lots of diffrent companies to run cable franchises all round the country. The companies were small and so were the franchises. They couldn't survive on their own. That's why you have lots of networks with diffrent technologies, because up until now, there were loads of cable companies. Its taken 15 years for all the cable companies to merge. This is why they're in such a mess. That time should have been spent competing with Sky and the monopoly that was/is BT.
Note: the Virgin deal hasn't happened yet and may never happen.
Now back to traffic shaping
