Re: Could be good
"That means price increases and even shittier service"
This would be difficult to do. Most customers are on 2 year contracts. If you look at the article, you'll see their subscriber growth is sluggish - you're talking hundreds of thousands in a good year, on a total customer base of some 4 million. That's at least half, and more like 3 quarters of your customers who can just up sticks and switch at any time. With BT now offering decent fibre services and good TV, there are genuine alternatives. Price increases and a shittier service would be a risky, risky way to improve their financial position. What's more likely IMHO is Liberty using their global financial clout to refinance the debt (interest rates are super low right now) and to get much better deals on content.
"VM put up a notice on the accounts page and once people read it then DS3 equipment is sent out for self-install..."
This is exactly what happened to me. We got a Tivo box on launch as a second STB, and the engineer noticed we had an out-of-date modem, so gave us a Superhub out of the back of his van. This led to us never receiving the "You should upgrade!" notice, as the network saw a superhub and assumed we'd had it. Ended up stuck on 50Mbit service, rather than the 100Mbit I should've been getting, for the best part of a year before I gave them a ring and had them upgrade the account - which for some reason involved sending out a new superhub for self-installation.
On the plus side I've now got two superhubs. But I'm not sure that's actually a plus side.