Saab,
Found your response earlier about the backhaul network a bit strong
especially...
You are right that CWW sold off its cable TV arm to NTL (which was
subsequently bought by Virgin).
Since CWW didn't collapse, no parts were
available to be picked up by Plusnet, or anybody else!
First point about C&W, you are incorrect - Bulldog was one of the leading edge ISP owned/operated by cable and wireless and as part of C&W's troubles it was sold on to Pipex who later got consumed by Tiscali. I was a customer of theirs when they offered Channel Bonded ISDN over 0800 links back in the day - they were very good.
BT bought plusnet for two reasons, firstly was the SME market they had penetrated (Small to medium Enterprises) and secondly becuase of their network as Milo alluded to. What BT was interested in was that Plusnet had implemented the Quality of Service (QOS) over their network so that high usage subscribers did not impact on the rest of the network users - interestingly what was not of interest was the network itself but the architecture behind it because they had a new project in the pipeline that could benefit from that expertise.
The new project was the 21CN project (21st century network) which is to move the telecoms infrastructure from TDM to IP - to do this without loss of quality is quite an art considering that voice data is RTP which if you dont want delay will be over UDP not TCP. This is still a major issue for many wholesale carriers even though optical routers have QOS metrics and routing capabilities built in.
So in essence I think you were a bit harsh on Milo as whilst he did not recall correctly it was C&W he was correct in that BT procured them primarily for the network knowhow if not the network itself.
Regards,
Jof
(long time since I posted on here)