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MovedGoalPosts · 31-10-2004, 20:10

For all the rhetoric emerging from government over Broadband Britain, IMO we were always destined to have a second rate service. Only where big business damands and thus pays for a high speed service, will the telco's (BT, cable or other specialist) make significant investment.

We had a great opportunity in the 1980s when the concept of cable was created. Unfortunately the blinkered approach of privatisation, which was saluted to drive competition has, IMO, now been seen to stifle it in the long term.

The cable cos, having won "exclusive" franchises were always going to be in an uncertain chicken and egg position. They had to invest incredible sums of money to tear up our streets and provide new infrastructure. That would then need continued maintenance and investment to keep up with the times. Meantime they start without any customer base, and the hardest thing known to any buisiness is to win customers. In practice the burden of debt of the installation was always going to be a feature, and thus the competition to the incumbent BT was for many years artificial. Even today, the cable co's may claim to be some of the largest ISPs. But in cabled areas, what proportion of take up of cable has there been compared to Sky and BT phone line based ADSL (all providers).

Meantime during this period of cable installation, BT's hands were tied, preventing them from doing the obvious, upgrading lines and in fact providing their own cable network. BT would not have had to spend so much digging up streets. Many of their ducts were in place. A natural process of accelerated maintenance, may well have provided a wider based cable network at lesser cost. I don't know, but if BT had been allowed to provide cable services, instead of the cable cos, we might, despite the lack of physical network competition, have had a cheaper, or at least faster network today?

We already see some ISPs looking at BT's network and the possibilities of Local Loop Unbundling for the ADSL services. This is IMO the model for what could have happened. BT should have been split into two companies, rather like gas or electricity. One company deals with the infrastructure (ie transco), the other can sell and provide the services, effectively buying network time or capacity from the infrastructure company. Thus British Gas in telco terms would be the ISP, or phone service supplier company. Investment would continue in the network infrastructure as the suppliers demanded advanced facilities, which in turn they are competing to bring to market first cheaper and better than their rival suppliers. The only difficulty is ensuring the network infrastructure provider does that at an economical cost. It worked for every other nationalised and then privatised company, gas, electric, even rail had a similar model (apart from the incompetent management of the network rail or whoever the permanent way company was), so why not telcoms?

It's all hypothetical now, as we have what we have, but it does make you wonder if the government of the day got it right.

31-10-2004, 20:10	#3
MovedGoalPosts Inactive Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: 127.0.0.1 Age: 62 Posts: 15,868	Re: UK Broadband For all the rhetoric emerging from government over Broadband Britain, IMO we were always destined to have a second rate service. Only where big business damands and thus pays for a high speed service, will the telco's (BT, cable or other specialist) make significant investment. We had a great opportunity in the 1980s when the concept of cable was created. Unfortunately the blinkered approach of privatisation, which was saluted to drive competition has, IMO, now been seen to stifle it in the long term. The cable cos, having won "exclusive" franchises were always going to be in an uncertain chicken and egg position. They had to invest incredible sums of money to tear up our streets and provide new infrastructure. That would then need continued maintenance and investment to keep up with the times. Meantime they start without any customer base, and the hardest thing known to any buisiness is to win customers. In practice the burden of debt of the installation was always going to be a feature, and thus the competition to the incumbent BT was for many years artificial. Even today, the cable co's may claim to be some of the largest ISPs. But in cabled areas, what proportion of take up of cable has there been compared to Sky and BT phone line based ADSL (all providers). Meantime during this period of cable installation, BT's hands were tied, preventing them from doing the obvious, upgrading lines and in fact providing their own cable network. BT would not have had to spend so much digging up streets. Many of their ducts were in place. A natural process of accelerated maintenance, may well have provided a wider based cable network at lesser cost. I don't know, but if BT had been allowed to provide cable services, instead of the cable cos, we might, despite the lack of physical network competition, have had a cheaper, or at least faster network today? We already see some ISPs looking at BT's network and the possibilities of Local Loop Unbundling for the ADSL services. This is IMO the model for what could have happened. BT should have been split into two companies, rather like gas or electricity. One company deals with the infrastructure (ie transco), the other can sell and provide the services, effectively buying network time or capacity from the infrastructure company. Thus British Gas in telco terms would be the ISP, or phone service supplier company. Investment would continue in the network infrastructure as the suppliers demanded advanced facilities, which in turn they are competing to bring to market first cheaper and better than their rival suppliers. The only difficulty is ensuring the network infrastructure provider does that at an economical cost. It worked for every other nationalised and then privatised company, gas, electric, even rail had a similar model (apart from the incompetent management of the network rail or whoever the permanent way company was), so why not telcoms? It's all hypothetical now, as we have what we have, but it does make you wonder if the government of the day got it right.