In Ireland the two main providers of digital television are NTL and Sky. They both share the vast majority of progamming but This Is where the similarities end. In the past few years Sky has invested hundreds of millions of euro into its service providing customers with added viewing features as digital features (red button) and recently have added the sky+ package and Sky HD. In the past five years the owners of NTL have invested zero euro into it's digital service. This has caused the swing to shift towards Sky who are recording five times more subscriptions than NTL and have grabbed the market share in the digital service.
The Irish times recently reported in its business section that NTL was purchased by an investment company in Colorado for one Billion dollers, Thus the ntl brand name will change to UPC. The Company liberty have also pledged 400 million euro to finally update the service in order to take on Sky. As a subsciber to NTL this is good news, so hopefully they pull through on their proposed promises and maybe NTL won't be known as the shit sky.
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Yeh most of that investment will go in the network, so that more areas will be able to get digital television. also, much of the network needs to be upgraded to accomodate cable broaband internet.
some areas in west dublin already have broadband, but widespread cable broadband is really important when it comes to driving competition in the internet market.
In most other countries, cable is a real option for lots of people, so it provides an alternative network. for instance in Ireland, Eircom owns the entire phone network, most other providers merely resell eircoms product - so they cant compete on speed, and price compeition is limited.
the two main competitors in other countries are usually the cable network vs the phone network. cable providers also have a special advantage as they can bundle digital tv, phone and internet all onto one bill.
If this new company invests in the network, and then goes out and aggresively competes for customers (as it will have to considering the current losses to sky) then it should have a positive effect on our internet bills and internet speeds. Which is needed cos we are way behind most other EU countries.
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