Telewest

» see telewest.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Blueyonder is a word i knew years before i knew what it was. It showed up in email addresses on forums and mailing lists through the early 2000s, next to ntlworld and btinternet, one of those british domain suffixes that quietly told you whose bill somebody was paying. I read them the way you read a foreign postcode, as a shape without a meaning attached. The company behind that one was Telewest, and it owned about half the cable in Britain.

Telewest starts in Croydon in 1984 with a local franchise called Croydon Cable, which United Cable of Denver bought in 1988. American money ran british cable almost from the beginning. The franchise passed through United Artists and then Tele-Communications Inc, and in 1992 a joint venture between TCI and US West gave it the name Telewest Communications. The strategy was the same one NTL was running on the other side of the map: buy the small regional licenses handed out in the eighties, stitch them into something national, and pay for it with debt.

By november 2000 Telewest could reach 4.9 million homes, having taken in Cable London and Eurobell along the way. That april it had merged with Flextech, which gave it a content arm and a stake in channels its own boxes were carrying. Two cable companies now covered Britain between them, in territories that never overlapped. They were less competitors than two halves of the same map.

~ the record ~

~ blueyonder ~

Blueyonder went live in march 2000 at fifty pounds a month for 512 kilobits. That was an absurd price and an absurd speed at the same time, in a country where most people were still paying for dial-up by the minute. By august the price had dropped to thirty-three pounds, because BT had started selling ADSL and the market had suddenly acquired a second option.

The speeds climbed after that, past 2 megabits and eventually to 10, and the cable in the ground turned out to be the right thing to have built. Blueyonder was the consumer face of it and for a few years it was the best broadband in Britain, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about a company assembled out of Croydon franchises.

~ the fall ~

The building had been done on around £5.3 billion of borrowed money, spread across eleven series of unsecured bonds, some in dollars and some in sterling. A cable network is a hole in the street that pays you back over fifteen years, and the interest does not wait that long. The bet was that broadband subscriptions would arrive fast enough to service it. They arrived. They did not arrive fast enough.

In september 2003 Telewest struck a debt for equity deal with its bondholders. Roughly £3.5 billion of debt turned into shares, the existing shareholders were left holding 1.5 percent of the company they had owned, and the consolidated shares came off the London Stock Exchange. When the restructuring completed in 2004 about £3.8 billion of debt had been canceled, more than sixty-five percent of the total, and what was left was moved into a Delaware holding company called Telewest Global. The bondholders now owned half of british cable. Liberty Media and W.R. Huff Asset Management were among the largest of them.

~ what it became ~

NTL announced the takeover in october 2005 at a reported six billion dollars, and the merger completed on 3 march 2006. The result went out under the name ntl:Telewest, two brands stapled together with a colon, which lasted under a year. Telewest brought 8,400 staff with it.

On 8 february 2007 the whole thing became Virgin Media. Telewest and NTL stopped existing on the same morning, and Blueyonder was folded into Virgin's broadband division alongside virgin.net. Nothing was switched off. The cable Croydon started laying in 1984 is still carrying traffic under a third owner's name, and blueyonder.co.uk addresses went on delivering mail for years after the company that issued them was gone.

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