This actually arose out of another thread, I posted an answer then made a huge diatribe about UK Cable.
Got rid of that and going to put it here instead.
Essentially trying to encourage some debate on where UKCable can go from here really
It centered around the Talk Talk deal and other special offers that are going and how it's all going on price. Why is ntl constantly discounting now, is it showing up that they can't compete in any other way?
The entire UK internet market is potentially shafted now and we're likely going to have endless clones offering mass market crap service for as low a price as possible. The hope for UK Cable is that they continue to push ADSL on speed as well as price, and innovate rather than cutting corners.
Another huge issue for UK Cable is they are making a mistake trying to compete with the a la carte broadband. If their other products were up to scratch they should be able to sell more on triple play / bundling.
However while the TV is still a poor cousin compared to Sky, the telephone and customer service not very good compared to BT, and the various deficiencies in billing, etc, remain they are stuck having to discount everything. They should be investing in enhancing their services rather than having to discount because their services can't stand up to the competition.
Losing customers that want to pay as little as humanly possible should
not be considered a bad thing just because it doesn't look good on the figures. Last I checked business is about the
profit you generate not the
revenue and unprofitable customers shouldn't be customers.
With the advent of LLU I imagine they are probably regretting not building out more as well. However much cheaper it may be to unbundle and hope for the best it'll never be able to deliver what a modern 2 way HFC / FTTH network could.
Coverage in existing areas is for want of a better word crap as well. There are 3.17 million households in London, largest city in Europe. Thanks to a poor initial build and an inexcusable failure to build any more as new developments have gone up only
58% of those households can get triple play over cable. Thanks to ongoing investment from Bulldog, Easynet, Homechoice and Be
95% of households can get LLU service, with basically all of those being able to take an ADSL2+ service which would for most be vastly faster than ntl/Telewest's 10Mbit.
Bear in mind of course that while the cable rollout has completely ceased Easynet are planning a full build of 1000 exchanges covering 70% of the UK population, this is of course with the backing of BSkyB. Bulldog have over 800 exchanges and counting, Be have an aggressive rollout plan, as do Wanadoo and Tiscali. LLU has already surpassed cable nationwide for availability and inevitably will be overtaking it region by region as time goes on.
Of course cable has the deep fibre advantage. Then again BT have been trialling fibre to the home and VDSL with fibre to the street cabinet. When they start actually rolling that out there goes the deep fibre advantage.
We'll see if ntl can reverse the long term trend of having their backsides kicked by Sky for TV, by ADSL for broadband and by BT for telephone. Telewest have faired somewhat better nonetheless the comparison doesn't flatter them particularly either. Cable uptake in the UK is
very low compared to elsewhere. Anomalously low.
Here come the stats
Source
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/...ns_regions.pdf
Accurate as of 31st December 2005, which works for ntl and Telewest
Ofcom report states there are 24.77 million households in the UK.
50.8% passed by cable
45% passed by digital cable
There are 3.3 million cable TV subscribers, of which 2.6 million are digital.
98% have digital satellite available, 77% Digital Terrestrial Television.
32% of UK households have digital satellite, 21% DTT, 10% cable. Cable has a lower uptake of television services than DTT or Satellite. This gap is increasing.
Internet wise...
Source = respective companies end of quarter reports.
Telewest end of year
Broadband Internet penetration 22.2%
4.525m homes marketed
1.005 million subs
ntl
Broadband Internet penetration 25.7%
7.0884m homes marketed
1.8239 million subs
UK Cable total penetration 24.36%
BT
Broadband Internet penetration 28%
24.6709m homes serviceable
6.9 million connections
BT have around 8 million connections right now, increasing their takeup to approximately 33%.
Things don't look at their greatest for UK Cable, already in a not inconsiderable amount of debt again due to the over 4 billion USD spent buying Telewest's shareholders out along with the debt acquired from Telewest.
It's hard to see where ntl:Telewest can go from here. Obviously the powers that be do have something interesting in mind for them somewhere along the line, however all the signs point to a more competitive market all around for them, with them being squeezed more on all of their services.
I'm far from convinced that 'quadruple play' will solve anything, especially as in ntl's case they are only able to shift triple play to less than 10% of their marketable homes.
Then there's the joys that the existing CATV networks will be reaching end of life soon, and components will start to degrade. Where to from there? Will the money even be there to replace the components in a timely fashion? Ideally a fibre to the home deployment. Maybe switched CATV or ethernet to the home. We can hope so, as without something
very interesting and seriously market disrupting one cannot see how cable will be able to compete.
That's my opinion anyway!
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