Are virgin media investing in cabling new areas?
Its frustrating not having the choice of Virgin Media cable in my area.
If Branson and Co are not investing in new areas, then I can only imagine its too expensive to do so and its much cheaper getting existing customers to pay up for more services.
To Sky's credit they have spent a lot on investment over the last decade or so and have gained many customers because of it.
Are Virgin simply not interested in expanding their customer base?
If Branson and Co are not investing in new areas, then I can only imagine its too expensive to do so and its much cheaper getting existing customers to pay up for more services.
To Sky's credit they have spent a lot on investment over the last decade or so and have gained many customers because of it.
Are Virgin simply not interested in expanding their customer base?
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The have got agreements with 3 main house builders to cable new developments which includes internal telephone and tv points. My developer was one of them.
Another, different developer close to me has got the same setup except that the show home is kitted out with TiVo and V HD boxes running virgin tv so customers can experience the offerings.
It's quite a ploy by them to be honest but sadly I think it's easier to cable a new development than it is to cable existing areas.
Sorry it doesn't help your cause but it does indicate how virgin are investing.
Virgin has said it will explore ways to provide its services outside its cabled areas and it does provide and ADSL service but it's not competitive. So, I think the answer is new build or nothing in terms of future cabling but if technology changes, this situation might too. Never say never!
But that spend is not about making their network bigger, as they don't need to, if you can see the satellite, you can receive the signal (obviously within reason, fringe areas need bigger dishes), so new customers just need a dish, whereas for VM, they need to physically connect you to their network. I think you will find VM are doing just as much "development" as Sky (VM Anywhere, Tivo, etc), just that has nothing to do with reach, they are 2 seperate things.
Who are the main 3 housebuilders? Barratt, Redrow and....
Our development is Taylor Wimpey, VM cable is present in the rest of our road but they didn't bother putting it in the new development, crazy! I've contacted the cable my street team and they said it'd be too expensive.
...Taylor Wimpey.
It does depend on when the build was planned I believe. When our new build was in the construction phase I had numerous meetings with the Virgin Media planner who was always on site and we discussed the in's and out's of it.
It is only a recent agreement so possibly some wont have it. The other Taylor Wimpey development we looked at didn't have it but it was commenced about 9 months earlier than ours.
I have no experience of Redrow but Barratt is the other developer.
Davidsons dont have an agreement either as 1 mile from us is a Davidsons development and they only have BT pre installed as is customary.
Pigs will fly first though.
The huge technical differences between the two networks would mean it's like the water and gas companies getting together to use the same pipes.
Plus Virgin would probably get the better deal - BT's network is capable of a lot more than Virgin's is.
Yeah I know all of the above, but it would be great if they could but like I said, pigs will fly before this would happen.
Who are the developers and when were the sites first prepared for development?
There pitch was,
''Will you double our network? at no extra Cost''
unless they can crank the cost up again for everyone, there will be very little expansion
That date was before the agreement hence no cable