The offer will be worth as much as 372p to institutional investors in cash or 352p as shares in the new "quadruple play" phone, mobile, broad and TV company.
Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin chairman, will trade his majority 71% stake in Virgin Mobile at a lower level to ensure that the institutional minority investors remain happy. He will take £125m in cash and a roughly 14% stake of the enlarged NTL, which will make him the new firm's biggest single shareholder.
It is expected that NTL will quickly take on the Virgin name under licence and rebrand as Virgin Media or Virgin Television. However, it is thought that there is still some wrangling as to how much NTL should have to pay for the privilege of using the Virgin name. Virgin was asking for £50m a year, but the figure is expected to be half of that.
The offer, which will be accepted by the Virgin board, follows NTL's original offer for Virgin Mobile in December when it bid £817m with an improved offer of around £920m made in January. It then agreed to increase its offer last month.
It is understood that the terms of the deal are very similar to the ones set out in January, which overall means that Branson will receive around £42m less than he would have done, because the company has agreed to accept a cash and share deal.
The Virgin deal follows the completion of the NTL and Telewest merger. Together, the two have 5m customers of whom 3.3m subscribe to pay TV. Virgin Mobile also has more than 5m customers, to which it offers pre-pay and monthly contract calls.
NTL will now be able to offer its customers a single bill for a complete range of services, but only just more than half of UK households can be reached with NTL/Telewest's cable network.
It is believed the merger could help boost the migration of TV content on to mobile phones by twinning a TV platform operator with a mobile network, albeit one that is a "virtual network" via a carriage agreement with T-Mobile.
Recently, Virgin Mobile has been running a trial of mobile TV services in a joint venture with BT's Livetime division.
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