So, the lily has been gilded i.e. the NTL/Telewest/Virgin Mobile combo has been rebranded as Virgin Media. What happens now will be very interesting as the new combo starts to offer quad play services – mobile and landline phone services, cable TV and broadband – to compete with others offering service bundles, like BSkyB, BT, Orange, and that well known triple play provider – Tesco.

This year looks likely to see a bloodbath in consumer service provision and there looks to be the capacity for enough churn to make an-Everest sized cheese mountain in the UK. There’s been a lot of talk about differentiators in this market, but maybe Virgin Media has an ace in the hole. Almost a year to the day I went down to NTL’s London labs for a demo of their next generation broadband technology and some GSM kit from access vendor ip.access. That day NTL’s network strategy director, Kevin Baughan demoed downstream speeds of 48Mbit/s and upstream ones of 18Mbit/s with an Ericsson VDSL2 digital subscriber line access module (DSLAM) and a Broadcom VDSL2 modem.

OK, it may well be that content will be king and the quality of the TV services might confer a knockout advantage. However, you need an access mechanism to deliver it. Remember 24Mbit/s ADSL2+ is fine as long as you’re close enough to your local exchange - cable access doesn’t need this and Virgin Media say they are going to extend their reach “to the other half of the country” as well. If NTL’s – sorry - Virgin Media’s labs technology can make it out of the lab then Virgin Media could be a serious contender.

08 Feb 2007