A spokeswoman said UPC was hiring for a number of positions, with the majority in its customer service call centre in Limerick. The company directly employs 900 staff and has 1,300 sub contractors.

The inhouse rebranding of UPC across all Irish divisions began last week as parent company Liberty Global released its second-quarter results and NTL and Chorus customers will begin receiving UPC-branded bills from October.

The integration of Chorus with NTL to become UPC has been, by all accounts, a difficult affair in terms of technical, financial and staff amalgamation since the companies were bought by Liberty Global in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

"There's a lot of moving parts and we're still fine tuning, " said UPC chief executive Robert Dunn.

UPC operations in Ireland during the first six months of 2007 added $148.4m ( 108.4m) to Liberty Global's second quarter revenue of $2.1bn. Irish revenues were up nearly $22m, or 17%, for the same period last year.

Although the number of customer relationships fell in Ireland from almost 600,000 in March to 592,000 in June, and revenue generating units dipped slightly from 658,000 to 656,000, Dunn said some of this attrition was down to "cleaning up the customer databases" as Chorus and NTL systems are more closely-merged.

UPC showed a healthy take up of its broadband services with a quarterly growth of 26,000 to reach 67,000. UPC now has 2,700 phone subscriptions from a starting point of only 600 at the beginning off the year, and digital television subscriptions stood at 216,500, up from 210,800 at the end of March. UPC will be ramping up the competition with Sky Ireland's digital offering next month when it launches its PVR service to take on Sky+ which allows viewers to pause and play back live TV.

Analogue TV subscriptions fell by 11,000 to 260,000 as customers migrated to digital offerings, and Dunn expects 400,000 Irish households will be able to avail of the full triple play service . . .phone, TV and broadband . . . by the end of the year.

"Early results from the [phone] product release are extremely positive and we're able to capitalise on providing all three triple play services from only 50 a month, a ground breaking proposition, " said Dunn.

With this competitive offering up and running Dunn admits the next hurdle is improving UPC's customer service responses, and 10m has been earmarked for a new customer care centre.