At about the time that NTL and Virgin jumped into bed together, I received their advertising flyer on a mobile phone offer (Octopus).  Although the letter was printed by NTL, the given advice was to phone Virgin to pursue the offer, which I have to say was one that I couldn't refuse.  In essence, for NTL broadband customers, a mobile phone worth £60 was being offered free of charge with a £10 monthly rental and a large amount of further free phone time etc.  The phone also offered digital image capture, etc, etc.

I went ahead with this fantastic offer and, right at the conclusion of the phone order, I was advised  by the agent that they no longer had the Octopus phone, to which I responded with: That's OK.  I'm quite happy to take another of a similar spec.   The embarrassed agent then pointed out that Virgin were now only offering a basic Nokia phone!!!!   Now that sudden sell-out of the Octopus phone was within 20 minutes of receiving  the NTL/Virgin  offer to its broadband customers.  I demanded to speak to a senior manager to obtain an explanation for this demonstration of gross mis-representation, only to learn that, "We actually ran out of the Octopus phones a month ago and we told NTL about this.", according to the manager.   Needless to say, I cancelled the order and told them that I would be reporting the matter to the appropriate authorities (Advertising Standards, Trading Standards and Ofcom).  After much time wasting by these agencies they decided that no action would be taken against NTL/Virgin, only a warning!

Incidentally, have you guys noticed that as from last July 1st 2007, the long-time practice by NTL of providing a free technical help-line no longer exists.  In the weeks leading up to July 1st, and when customers were not aware of the loss of the  imminent free phone line to NTL customers, there were promises by their Indian call centres to phone back when they couldn't provide solutions to problems of their making (they never did)!  E-mailing issues to them resulted in delayed responses along the lines that they were experiencing technical problems, and with no resolution of the stated problem.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now can reasonably infer that Virgin's takover of NTL (and that's what it was, not a merger) was an exercise in increasing market share followed by asset stripping and offering the company for sale in the expectation of the share-holders acquiring massive profits.