Liberty Global in the context of BT Cellnet

Cable & Wireless plc was a British telecommunications company. In the mid-1980s, it became the first company in the UK to offer an alternative telephone service to British Telecom (via subsidiary Mercury Communications). The company later offered cable TV to its customers, but it sold its cable assets to NTL (now Virgin Media) in 2000. It remained a significant player in the UK telecoms market and in certain overseas markets, especially in the former British colonies of the Caribbean, where it was formerly the monopoly incumbent. It was also the main supplier of communication in the British South Atlantic, including Saint Helena and the Falkland Islands. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

The company split in March 2010, with its international division demerging to form Cable & Wireless Communications, acquired by Liberty Global in 2015, and since spun-off in 2018 from Liberty Global to Liberty Latin America, while the remainder of the Cable & Wireless business became Cable & Wireless Worldwide and was acquired by Vodafone in 2012.

Telefonica UK Limited, trading as O2 UK (stylised as O₂), is a British telecommunications services provider. It is the largest mobile network in the United Kingdom, with approximately 23.2 million subscribers as of December 2024.

Since 2021, O2 UK has formed a subsidiary of Virgin Media O2, a 50:50 joint venture between Telefónica and Liberty Global formed through the merger of their respective O2 UK and Virgin Media businesses.

Virgin Media Limited is a British telecommunications company which provides telephone, television and internet services in the United Kingdom. Its headquarters are at Green Park in Reading. It is owned by Virgin Media O2, a 50:50 joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefónica. Since its foundation in 2007, the company has used the Virgin branding under license from Richard Branson.

Virgin Media owns and operates its own hybrid fibre-coaxial and fibre to the premises (FTTP) networks. Although most of the network is urban, Nexfibre (a 50:50 joint venture between Virgin Media O2 and Infravia Capital Partners) is expanding the network to more areas. As of year end 2024, it had a total of approximately 5.8 million customers. Since the acquisition of Smallworld Cable in 2014, Virgin Media is the main cable provider in the UK, with connections available to over 18.4 million homes in 2024. Virgin Media is one of the "big four" internet service providers in the UK along with BT (EE), Sky and TalkTalk. In the past, Virgin Media also operated a mobile virtual network operator (Virgin Mobile) and operated TV channels and produced television content (Virgin Media Television).

Virgin TV is a digital pay cable television service in the United Kingdom, owned by Liberty Global (50%) and Telefónica (50%) after the merger its UK businesses to form Virgin Media O2. Its origins date from NTL and Telewest, formerly two of the UK's largest cable operators, which merged on 6 March 2006. All NTL:Telewest services were rebranded as Virgin Media in February 2007. Since the acquisition of Smallworld Cable in 2014, Virgin is the sole national cable TV provider in Great Britain. Currently about 51% of UK households have access to Virgin's network, which is independent from BT's Openreach network.

Virgin ranks as the UK's second-largest pay TV service, and the service is provided in conjunction with Virgin Media broadband and phone. As of Q3 2007, it had 3.6 million subscribers, compared to 8.2 million on its traditional rival Sky. As of 2009, Virgin's digital cable television currently uses the Nagravision 3 conditional access system. The service was fully digitalised in 2013.