NTL Ireland
NTL Communications (Ireland) Limited is a cable television and MMDS company in the Republic of Ireland. As of 2005 it is owned by Morgan Stanley under a warehousing agreement with UGC Europe (see history, below), having been divested by NTL. It continues to use the NTL brand under licence pending an on-sale.
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Services
The company holds the cable television licences for Dublin, Galway, and Waterford cities (with the Dublin licence also covering Leixlip, County Kildare, Dunboyne, County Meath, and Bray, County Wicklow). It also holds MMDS franchises for cells covering the above counties, as well as County Mayo. It provides an analogue cable television service (with a very high take up in its areas passed), which provides the Irish national channels, BBC One, BBC Two, ITV1, Channel 4, Sky One, Sky News Ireland, and a small number of other channels. It also provides a digital television service, however the take up of this is still a minority of homes passed. However the company has converted its entire MMDS network to digital, with the analogue MMDS now switched off.
History
RTÉ / Telecom ownership
The company began operations in 1970 as RTÉ Relays, a subsidary of Radio Telefís Éireann. It carried four channels - RTÉ Television, BBC One, BBC Two, and Ulster Television. In 1984, the company merged with Dublin Cable Systems, itself the product of a merger of Marlin Cable with Phoenix Relays. In 1986, the Irish Government began to allow Irish cable companies to carry non-terrestrial (ie satellite) services. In the same year, RTÉ merged all of its cable operations (including two other cable companies, Galway Cablevision and Waterford Cablevision) to form Cablelink Limited.
As Cablelink, the company was Ireland's largest cable company by far, and expanded to a fifteen channel service (plus premium channels) gradually. In 1990, Telecom Éireann acquired 60% of the company from RTÉ. The biggest controversy the company managed to embroil itself during this time was a dispute with British Sky Broadcasting over carrige fees for Sky One and Sky News. This led to the two channels being pulled from the platform from 1992-1994. The "return of Bart Simpson" was prematurely announced by Cablelink serveral times before the channels actually reappeared.
Sale to NTL
In 1999, as part of the privatisation of Eircom, the Government put pressure on the shareholders of Cablelink to sell the company. Part of the reason was that Eircom was regarded by some as a "spoiler shareholder" in Cablelink, refusing to allow the company to compete in the voice telephony market that it dominated. The company was put up for auction, with bidders including Esat Telecom Group, NTL, and UPC, as well as CMI Cable and Irish Multichannel. It was eventually announced that NTL would acquire the company for IEP 650m.
Under NTL, the company was renamed NTL Ireland on 3 July 2000, and began offering telephony and internet services. The company began to upgrade its network and in 2001 launched its digital television service. However the company lost two managing directors during the time NTL ran the franchise. The biggest crisis erupted in early 2001, when NTL stopped selling its direct telephony and high-speed interent services, and halted the roll out of its upgraded hybrid fibre coax network. This led to a very public row with the Commission for Communications Regulation, and the resignation of Ian Jeffers, the NTL executive who had been assigned to the Dublin operation upon the NTL takeover. Some years later, the company was forced to suspend its telephone service after problems with the equipment emerged.
Sale to Morgan Stanley
In 2005, it emerged that NTL planned to sell its Irish business. As a result of its expected merger with Telewest Broadband, the Irish assets were now considered non-core. In May 2005, Morgan Stanley acquired the Irish assets of NTL on behalf of Liberty Global Europe (then called UGC Europe).
For now the company continues to be run (under licence) as NTL Ireland. However a Competition Authority investigation into the proposed re-sale of the company to Liberty Global Europe took place. On 4 November 2005 it was announced the the Competition Authority had cleared the deal, subject to the appointment of an independent director to the board of UPC Ireland and restrictions on the influence of John C. Malone on the running of the Irish business.
The deal must now await the apporval of the Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment, Micheál Martin. If the sale is approved, it is expected that UGC will merge NTL Ireland with its existing Irish operations - Chorus Communications - as UPC Ireland. If the sale is not approved, it is expected that Morgan Stanley will try to find another bidder for the company.