Virgin Finally Does The Deed With NTL

Deals

from the can't-avoid-the-puns dept

Some folks weren’t so thrilled with the easy and obvious puns served up during the all-too-long and all-too-public saga of NTL and Virgin Mobile in the UK trying to merge, but now that it’s finally happening, four months after initially rumored, it’s still a bit difficult to avoid them. In the meantime, though, while plenty of folks in the press prattle on about how this creates a “quadruple play” (or whatever they want to call it) solution in the UK, remember that there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The true future opportunity of connecting all these various services comes from doing it all over a single pipe — with wireless being the true holy grail in this race. That’s a problem, because the combined NTL/Virgin Mobile is actually missing the most interesting and most compelling part of the equation, since Virgin’s wireless network isn’t actually its own.