A QUESTION MARK today hangs over thousands of high-tech jobs in Hampshire as American owned cable group NTL announced it was planning to cut its workforce by up to 4,000.

The Hampshire based company currently employs 17,000 people in the UK but said it intended slashing numbers to 13,000.

With headquarters at Hook, near Basingstoke and much of its high-tech operations based in south Hampshire, it grew out of the former ITV engineering base at Crawley, near Winchester.

It is currently developing a teleport where up to 21 satellite dishes could be based at Morn Hill, outside Winchester, although so far only one satellite dish has been erected, and NTL officials admit that there was not yet sufficient public demand for multimedia telecommunications services to justify more. It has more operations at Stategic Park at Hedge End.

Public relations manager for NTL Liz Nicholson said it was not yet known whether the job losses would have an effect on the Morn Hill project.

She also stressed that at this stage the company, which also has a dispatch office in Andover, was not specifying where the cuts would be made.

"We are going through a 90-day consultation process with those that will be affected," she said.

"We have already announced that the further 2,000 people would be made redundant by the end of 2002.

"The business climate and the operating environment in the industry as a whole is to blame," she added.

The move is part of a cost-cutting programme, which chief executive Barclay Knapp said was ''prudent'' in the current climate.

ntl is US-owned and listed on the NYSE, with headquarters in the UK and offices in Europe and Asia/Pacific, it claims 3m residential customers in the UK and 32 million worldwide, and is developing a broadband network which passes roughly two-thirds of urban households in Britain.

It is already one of the largest broadband communications companies in the world. Till now, its technical expertise, strong management and ambitious growth strategies had made it the new technology company to watch around the globe. It has invested in more than 25 ventures in the communications and media world - as stakeholders, partners or owners. It claimed to have technical expertise, commercial knowhow and the business development strategies are all in place to meet the demands of tomorrow's communications market.

Its technical expertise embraces optical fibre, broadband coax and copper, broadcast, satellite and radio, plus key applications like telecoms, TV, internet and mobile.