Was it ever really Virgin?
I was heavily involved in the original merger of NTL and Telewest, soon to be followed up by the adoption of the Virgin mobile offering. NTL was so toxic at the time they wanted to make a clean break and to go with a much more customer friendly brand, so they paid Richard Branson a very great deal of money to take over his loss-making mobile sales arm along with the use of the brand name Virgin. In fact this was nothing more than a mobile reseller, and had nothing really to do with the Virgin company and its core values. So for the employees to quote Branson and his values is disingenuous, as the original links to him (and the core Virgin Group) were extremely tenuous.
As an aside, NTL offered television, phone and Internet as their "Triple-Play" customer offering. With the addition of a mobile service, the marketing department called this "Four-Play", and went as far a printing sales materials before someone pointed out the possible difficulties of trying to offer the public a Virgin foreplay service..!!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
