Telewest bleep

[m419]

When I call someone from my Telewest home phone, halfway through certain phone calls, a long series of loud and irritating bleeps happen during phone calls, it's mostly outgoing calls and want to know what it is.

I heard it used to happen to Mercury customers when they used the 131 and 132 services, however Mercury Communications now trading as NTL,T-Mobile,Cable and Wireless,Page One,Tiscali and Infolines has no connection what so ever with the Telewest and NTL Cable franchise telephone networks.

[Stuart]

Err, T-Mobile is part of Deustche Tellecom.

Mercury Communications always was part of Cable and Wireless (as were One2One/T-Mobile, among other companies).

The beeping is possibly part of the billing system, but you shouldn't be hearing it..

[m419]

Err, I know that! One2one was one of Mercury's main businesses.

Take a look below to find out what happened to other Mercury businesses:

One2one: T-Mobile (UK) Limited (A division of Deutsche Telekom)
Mercury Paging: PageOne Communications and Oventus
Mercury Payphones: IPM Comms/infolines (Traded as Interphone)
Mercury Residential: NTL/NPower (Sold to Tiscali in 2004)
Mercury residential internet: Sold to NTL World in 2001

Other Cable and Wireless Business:

Cable and Wireless Communications was a merge between Nynex,Bellcable Media,Videotron,Mercury and Cable and Wireless. Cable and Wireless owned 100% of Mercury and in 2000, NTL purchased the residential sector of CWC, therefore, NTL bought the shares owned by Videotron,Nynex,Cable and Wireless and Bell Cable Media.

Not forgetting that NTL also purchased all of the shares of Comcast in 1998 and BT Cable in 1999.

One2one was a division of Mercury Communications (Later CWC) and US-West, the company was sold to Deutsche Telekom in 2001 and rebranded 'T-Mobile' in 2002.

US-West were the owners of Telewest before NTL merger as I rightly remember as US West was previously called United Artists. And Eurobell was onced owned by Deutsche Telekom.

IPM Communications, an italian payphone company aquired Burwell Plc and Mercury payphones. The company removed the blue mercury kiosks with these Orange kiosks with new phones which were more high tech than BT's. Some kiosks were replaced with hooded kiosks and very few Mercury telephone boxes were adopted by IPM. Infolines Premier bought out the company in 2000 and the kiosks were in a bad state of disrepair. In 2002 Interphone was sold to Central Payphones (Infolines Public Networks).

PageOne is the only paging alternative to Vodafone and has a high tech paging network, so if paging is scrapped completely, Pageone could focus on something else with it's existing equipment. O2 paging closed in 2004 and all customers were transfered to Pageone, making it the largest paging company in the UK.