US cable giant NTL will create almost 900 jobs in Northern Ireland in the next four years, at its Cabletel subsidiary.

The company, which recently paid £535 million (€680 million) for Cablelink, has also indicated that it will offer telephony services to its customers in the Republic by the end of this year.

NTL's managing director, Mr Owen Lamont, said yesterday he would meet the Cablelink management within the next two weeks to discuss how best to plan the company's future.

He said Cablelink might offer a cable/telephony package to its customers in the Republic, as it already does in the North.

Mr Lamont said Cablelink had done a very good job providing cable services, but it was likely that the company would offer "bundled" services - a package combining telephony and cable services. He said this had worked well for NTL in the North.

Its basic package is £8.87 sterling (€13.67) per month, which includes the terrestrial stations - BBC 1, BBC 2, UTV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 as well as five or six cable channels and a telephone line.

Mr Lamont said NTL could provide a telephony service on an indirect basis before Christmas. "We could interconnect with Telecom Eireann, but interconnect is proving to be a non-trivial task," he said. "It's proving to be a long process and one which I would like to see speeded up." Interconnect is used by telecoms or cable companies to provide a full telephony service - Telecom carry part of the call on behalf of the other operator.

Mr Lamont said the company would target business as well as residential customers in the Republic. Business customers would be interested in services such as high speed Internet access, private networks for customers and alternative telephony services, he said. Mr Lamont expected NTL would create more employment through the Cablelink acquisition. He added that he expected some consolidation in the cable/telephony industry over the next couple of years.

"I see two or three strong players in the industry within about three years," he said.

Many of the jobs announced for the North yesterday will be for a call centre to handle customer inquiries and billings for its UK operations. NTL, through Cabletel, employs around 400 people directly and a further 500 indirectly. Mr Lamont said NTL was investing $1 billion (€970 million) in Northern Ireland. Yesterday's project announcement involves a £3.8 million sterling investment by the Industrial Development Board. NTL is making a capital investment of £4.5 million and an additional overall investment of £15.6 million.

The Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, said the seeds of the investment were sown during a visit to NTL in New York during the IDB's roadshow in the US last October.

NTL said it would spend £181 million on its infrastructure in the North over the next four years.

Mr Lamont said it now had 70,000 residential and 10,000 business subscribers in the North.