Neighbourhood Cable

» see neighbourhoodcable.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Australian cable television is usually told as a story about two companies fighting over the same streets in Sydney and Melbourne and wasting a great deal of money doing it. Neighbourhood Cable is the footnote that went the other way. It started digging on 1 March 1996 in Mildura, a river town in the far northwest of Victoria, and within two years its hybrid fiber coax ran past two-thirds of the homes and ninety percent of the businesses there.

Ballarat came next, then Geelong. By 2001 the company had 900 kilometers of cable past 38,000 homes with about 1,500 customers actually signed up, plus drawn-up rollouts for Bendigo and Shepparton that never happened. Thirty-eight thousand homes passed against fifteen hundred signed up: there is the business in two numbers. The plant went in years ahead of the take-up, and somebody had to fund the gap.

It sold television over that cable, along with broadband and telephone service. It was one of a very small number of Australian companies selling local loop services that were not Telstra's, and one of an even smaller number with a live HFC network of its own.

~ the dossier ~

~ espn2 in mildura ~

Because it bought its own channel lineup instead of reselling somebody else's, Neighbourhood Cable ended up carrying things that were not available anywhere else in the country. The American ESPN2 ran on this network and on no other Australian system. Some of the Discovery Channel variants appeared here before they appeared nationally, and so did CNN Headline News. Several thousand households in regional Victoria had a channel list that subscribers in Sydney could not get.

The channel list is what I have trouble picturing from Ankara. Cable television in Turkey was Kablo TV, run by the state carrier, and the lineup was whatever the lineup was, the same in Ankara as in Trabzon. The channels were a national decision. The notion that a company in a provincial town could buy its own feeds and end up with programming the biggest city in the country could not get has no Turkish equivalent that I know of.

~ forty cents a share ~

The listed entity has a slightly comic paper trail. It reached the ASX in April 2000 through a shell called National Investments Limited and traded as Neighborhood Cable Limited, with the American spelling, until 29 November 2004, when somebody finally fixed it. The shares were consolidated fifty to one during 2005. The sequence that ended the listing began with a request for another five million dollars to keep operating.

Trading was suspended at the close on Thursday 2 June 2005 under listing rule 17.4, which is the rule about failing to lodge your accounts. The venture firm TVG, already a backer, moved to compulsory acquisition at forty cents cash a share through a vehicle called TVG Neighbourhood Cable Holdings SCA, and the company was delisted on 15 July 2005. After that it was private and the public record thins out considerably.

~ the rebrand ~

TransACT, the Canberra network operator, announced on 18 December 2007 that it was buying Neighbourhood Cable, effective 1 January 2008. For three years the Victorian networks kept their own name under the new owner. In October 2010 they launched DOCSIS 3 service in Geelong and Ballarat, extending it to Mildura afterward, with tiers running up to 100 Mbps, which in regional Australia in 2010 was a genuinely good number.

Then on 7 June 2011 Stephen Withers opened an itWire piece with the obituary itself: "Three years after being acquired by TransACT, the Neighbourhood Cable brand is no more." TransACT CEO Ivan Slavich explained that the name change reflected the full range of services the company provided to its Victorian customers, which is the standard sentence for this event. Wikipedia dates that article to 8 June. The page itself says 7 June, which is what this entry goes with. The brand lasted fifteen years and three months.

TransACT did not keep its own name much longer. iiNet completed a roughly $60 million purchase of it on 30 November 2011, less than six months after the rebrand, and TPG bought iiNet in 2015. The Victorian coax that a small company put in the ground in the 1990s kept carrying traffic under a succession of brands picked out in Perth and then in Sydney. neighbourhoodcable.com.au does not resolve.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »