CABLE company ComTel, which covers Oxfordshire, has been taken over in a £550m deal.

The firm, the fourth largest cable operator in the UK, has been bought out by NTL, one of the principal telecom companies in the country.

NTL also bought out the UK's seventh largest cable firm Diamond Cable, which operates chiefly in the east Midlands.

NTL has only just completed the purchase of another cable operator Comcast.

The deals mean the number of UK cable companies has dropped from 24 to five in five years.

Analysts predict the fall in numbers will continue, driven by the huge cash demands of the cable business, until only two or three major groups remain.

NTL said it had agreed to acquire ComTel, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dutch telecom operator KPN, for £550m in two stages.

NTL's chief executive Barclay Knapp said: "With the addition of ComTel and Comcast, together with Diamond, we will have nearly 5.5m franchise homes, more than 846,000 telephone customers and nearly 702,000 cable television customers."

He said ComTel's franchises, which cover about 1.1m homes in the Midlands and south east England, are directly adjacent to NTL's suburban London franchises in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey and Hampshire.

More than £500m has been invested in the ComTel cable network, which passes about 991,000 homes. The company has 166,000 cable television subscribers and 2,600 business telephone customers.

Telewest is currently top of the UK cable operators' league, followed by Cable and Wireless Communications and NTL.

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