Virgin Media is a British telecommunications company which provides telephone, television and internet services in the United Kingdom. Its headquarters are at Green Park in Reading , England. In July , the company purchased Virgin Mobile UK , creating the first " quadruple-play " media company in the United Kingdom, offering television, internet, mobile phone and fixed-line telephone services.
In November , the company signed a deal with Sir Richard Branson to license the Virgin brand for the combined business. All of the company's consumer services were rebranded under the Virgin Media name in February Virgin Media owns and operates its own fibre-optic cable network in the United Kingdom, although optical fibre does not reach customer premises, instead going to a nearby street cabinet to provide a fibre to the cabinet service. As of 31 December , it had a total of approximately 4. Telewest began in in Croydon under the name "Croydon Cable", [6] and was acquired by United Cable of Denver in Prior to acquiring Virgin.
Telewest and NTL began discussions about a merger in late Thanks to their geographically distinct areas, NTL and Telewest had co-operated previously, as in redirecting potential customers living outside their respective areas. To prevent this, Telewest instead acquired NTL. Nine of the 11 directors of the new board came from NTL, with two from Telewest. NTL:Telewest's takeover of Virgin Mobile completed on 4 July , creating the UK's first ' quadruple play ' media company, bringing together television, broadband, mobile phone and fixed-line phone services.
The deal included a year exclusive branding agreement [15] that saw NTL adopt the "Virgin" name after it completed its merger with Telewest. In February , Virgin Central , an on-demand service, gained the rights to begin showing episodes of the television show Lost already shown on Sky 1 , and other shows including Alias and The OC. This service extended the on-demand service previously known as Teleport TV.
A channel agreement for Virgin Media to keep non-premium Sky channels ended on 1 March Virgin Media and Sky failed to reach agreement on the issue, and Sky reacted by posting a letter to the public in major UK newspapers on 28 February Sky attributed part of the rate rise to the fact that the new deal would also include Sky3 , Sky Arts and undisclosed high definition and video on demand content.
On 2 March the National Consumer Council accused Sky and Virgin of "behaving like children" and stated that it would consider whether or not to raise a super-complaint against them "that will help to knock heads together" by the end of that month. BSkyB claimed that Virgin Media made little effort to further arbitration. As part of the agreements, both Sky and Virgin Media agreed to terminate all High Court proceedings against each other relating to the carriage of their respective basic channels.
On 26 August the Advertising Standards Authority upheld claims made by Virgin Media in its marketing, despite a complaint from rival broadband provider Sky. On 20 July , it was announced that Virgin Media would stop broadcasting all of the UKTV channels from 22 July over fees [40] and an issue with Virgin's on-demand broadcasting rights.
The app now features five times the amount of more on-demand content now available. It is said the merger will form one of the UK's largest entertainment and telecommunications companies, which will become a major rival to BT Group. The broadband division combines NTL's cable-broadband operations broadband Internet access connections through cable , Blueyonder Telewest's cable-broadband operations and Virgin. Virgin Broadband in cabled areas is marketed as "fibre optic broadband". It is a FTTN network, where fibre optic trunk lines are used to connect the area's headend to cabinets on the street.
Since most broadband connections in the UK are provided by ADSL, and the quality of individual phone lines varies according to distance from exchange, [50] most landline broadband services are marketed as being the maximum speed that the individual's phone line will support, "up to 8mb". As a result, actual speeds obtained vary greatly, but are always constrained by the individual phone line — the quality of which is out of the control of the broadband provider. Cable broadband has no such speed variability caused by connection quality as the network is fully owned and controlled by the cable company providing the broadband — any slowdowns are wholly as a result of traffic shaping, or local capacity being over-sold or over-subscribed.
The cabinets were linked to Virgin Media backhaul via new fibre laid by Vtesse Networks through BT's local exchange, 5 km away. During July the trial was extended to existing commercial infrastructure in the Welsh village of Crumlin , Caerphilly. On 7 October , Ofcom ordered BT to open up its fibre-optic network to competing broadband providers to help drive forward the rollout of high-speed internet services in the UK. Virgin Media confirmed plans to expand its broadband network in the UK by using the infrastructure owned by BT.
The roll-out was expected to be complete by mid The rollout is expected to be completed by early In February , Virgin Media announced its biggest investment in broadband infrastructure in over a decade. On 29 September , Virgin Media announced its broadband packages would be rebranded as Vivid. On 22 March , Virgin Media made ultrafast speeds standard with new bundles. They aim to finish the rollout across the entire Virgin Media network by the end of Virgin Media maintain on their consumer website that they do not throttle user's download or upload bandwidth.
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However, Virgin Media did originally employ a form of bandwidth throttling whereby customer bandwidth was reduced temporarily after a threshold was reached during peak periods. The company experimented with and revised all parameters involved in the throttling, such as threshold size, peak period definitions, throttling percentage and duration. Separate thresholds were applied to upstream and downstream, and thresholds varied between packages.
In , Virgin Media changed [71] their traffic management policy to the detriment of their customers. From 28 February , Virgin Media announced that they were scrapping traffic management for downstream traffic on 30Mb or higher packages. As a result of this, 30Mb or higher packages were only throttled on the upstream, where as 20Mb or below packages were throttled on both the upstream and the downstream. These servers are outsourced to the Highwinds Network Group and are physically based in Amsterdam , Netherlands. Virgin Media also hosts another operational Usenet server previously known as "text.
Other users will only be able to access a limited amount of free content on the TfL portal, with full mobile internet services offered on a pay-as-you-go basis. Virgin Phone offers landline telephone services; it ranks as the number two service behind the former UK state monopoly, BT Group.
On 1 April , Virgin Media began to offer free home phone to mobile calls. Virgin TV ranks as the UK's largest provider of on-demand content, with over 3 million Video on Demand VoD customers and as of October [update] over 6, hours of programming. Virgin TV carries around digital television and radio channels, including a mixture of subscription, premium subscription and pay-per-view channels.
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In parallel, the companies reached a number of agreements providing for the carriage of certain Sky standard and high-definition HD channels, including securing new carriage agreements for wholesale distribution of Sky's basic channel line-up, including Sky 1 and Sky Arts , and the newly acquired VMtv channels, on Virgin Media's cable TV service.
On 29 June , the Irish Competition Authority cleared the proposed transaction. Virgin1 was also a part of the deal but was rebranded as Channel One on 3 September , as the Virgin name was not licensed to Sky. Virgin Media owned Sit-up Ltd, a UK-based broadcaster of home shopping television channels, as a joint venture from its launch in and in full from May It is one of the United Kingdom's largest television companies.
In the UK, on digital terrestrial television, Yesterday and Dave are available on the Freeview platform. W formerly Watch is currently the flagship channel operated by the network; it is a general entertainment channel that launched on 7 October Scripps Networks Interactive's existing voting rights and board representation would be unaffected by this proposed arrangement, which would be subject to BBC Executive and BBC Trust approvals. Following the completion of the merger between NTL and Telewest, and the acquisition of Virgin Mobile, the company agreed a year licensing agreement with Sir Richard Branson 's Virgin Group to use the Virgin brand, with a ten-year opt-out clause.
Branson accepted a mix of shares and cash, making him a Virgin Group had the option of buying back the Virgin Television has currently [update] around 3. Virgin Media launched in February , with a public relations event and expensive advertising campaign covering major UK television channels, newspapers and billboards.
Jackson , Marc Warren , and David Tennant. In , Virgin Media launched a multimillion-pound ad campaign starring Usain Bolt and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson to promote Virgin's superfast broadband service.
On 8 June , Southampton F. There has been widespread criticism of this policy expressed on the internet, large internet communities are requesting that Virgin customers end their subscription and initiate a mass boycott. According to Virgin Media, the comments in the article were taken out of context and misinterpreted. We strongly support the principle that the internet should remain a space that is open to all and we have not called for content providers to pay for distribution.
However, we recognise that as more customers turn to the web for content, different providers will have different needs and priorities and in the long term, it's legitimate to question how this demand will be managed. We welcome an informed debate on this issue.
On 2 April , The Daily Telegraph reported that Virgin Media would be beginning a trial to take action against subscribers who are illegally downloading copyrighted material from internet Peer-to-peer P2P services. Information of offenders would be provided by the British Phonographic Industry , and then Virgin Media and the BPI sends a warning letter to the customer.
Virgin Media and the BPI denied reports of any agreement or pilot scheme and said they were only in talks on the matter. In July , the BBC reported that Virgin Media customers who the BPI claim are sharing copyrighted files were sent warning letters in envelopes marked "If you don't read this, your broadband connection could be disconnected". At least one recipient of the letter denied any wrongdoing by any authorised user of his broadband connection.
On 26 November , it was revealed that Virgin Media would trial deep packet inspection technology to measure the level of illegal file sharing on its network. It will then peer inside those packets and try to determine what is licensed and what is unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry.
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Virgin Media emphasised that it is seeking to measure the overall level of illegal file sharing, not to keep records on individual customers. Data on the level of copyright infringement will be aggregated and anonymised. On 22 January , the European Commission confirmed that although it had not discussed the matter with Virgin Media, it would "closely monitor" the trial. Virgin Media charges customers exit fees when they move to a location where they are unable to receive Virgin Media services. Ofcom is investigating Virgin Media for this practice and was due to make a preliminary decision in April Ofcom also found it had reasonable grounds for believing Virgin had contravened another General Condition when it failed to publish on its website clear and up-to-date information about the ETCs payable when fixed term contracts are terminated.
In early , it was announced that the ISP arm of Virgin Media had entered into a contract along with BT and TalkTalk with the former spyware company Phorm responsible under their Media guise for the Apropos rootkit [] [] to intercept and analyse their users' click-stream data, and sell the anonymised aggregate information as part of Phorm's OIX advertising service. Though Phorm initially claimed Virgin Media had signed an exclusive contract and were committed to implementing Phorm's Webwise tracking system, Virgin Media have since distanced themselves from this and now state that they have only signed a preliminary contract with Phorm to better understand the tracking technology, and are under no obligation to implement it.
The blacklisting has since been rescinded. In March , it became known that the Virgin Media marketing database accommodating the personal details phone numbers, home and email addresses of , users was left unsecured for 10 months. The company admitted that a member of their staff hadn't followed the correct security procedures, which resulted in the system's vulnerability. It is known for sure that at least one occasion of unauthorised access took place throughout these 10 months.
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A forensic investigation was launched after shutting down access to gauge the extent of damage and determine whether some data was theft. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. British cable and telecommunications company. This article is about the UK company known as Virgin Media. It has been suggested that Virgin Media Pioneers be merged into this article.
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Discuss Proposed since February Telecommunications Mass media. John C. Digital television broadband internet fixed-line telephone mobile telephony. Operating income. Net income. Virgin Media Business Virgin Mobile. Further information: Timeline of cable television in the United Kingdom. Main article: Virgin Media Business. Main article: Virgin Mobile UK. Main article: Virgin TV. Main article: Living TV Group. Main article: Bid Shopping. Main article: UKTV. Main article: Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia.