Quote:
Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
I am very much not in favour of TalkTalk and Sky receiving any kind of access to dark fibre unless it's done very carefully.
They have been awful for the broadband market from my point of view, treating broadband as a freebie or as a retention tool and driving down quality in the case of TalkTalk while feeding the idea that good broadband should cost nothing by subsidising it senseless out of the TV business in the case of Sky.
They are also both slowing the replacement of BT's ageing copper network by clinging on for all they are worth to their own LLU infrastructure. They are far more addicted to copper than BT are, their entire business models depend on it.
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Agreed. The trouble is that both of them have modelled their business on buying the bare minimum of infrastructure. Sky have repeatedly moaned they don't have access to Virgin's cable network, but VM (and the cable cos before it) have spent billions building that network, why *should* they open it up? If Murdoch wanted Sky to have access to Cable TV enough he has the resources to enable Sky to build their own network. They didn't. They spent some money on Satellite facilities, then rented space on a satellite. While Sky will have spent a lot of money on their infrastructure, I'll lay odds it's nowhere near what even Virgin Media have spent, not including what NTL, Telewest and the other cable companies spent.
Do I agree that the existing broadband companies should be required to open their networks even more. No. I don't. It will drive prices down, which is good in the short term for the consumer. It is not, however, good for the ISPs and therefore not good for the consumer in the long term as the ISPs will be forced to cut back investment on infrastructure. Something that while it won't affect headline speeds (because these are a selling point) will affect both reliability and contention on the networks, neither of which are selling points, so while the ISPs have to upgrade their networks to cope with new speeds, there will be nothing stopping them bunging as many customers on the network as possible.
---------- Post added at 12:22 ---------- Previous post was at 12:18 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kushan
I think I'm largely in agreement with you, Igni. My only point of view that differs is on a lot of BT's network that was subsidised with taxpayer money, however OFCOM already regulates a lot of this so I'm not sure more needs to be opened.
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I'm in two minds about that. I know that BT have replaced a lot of the network since privatisation, but how much does the central infrastructure cost compared to the sheer number of phone lines that were installed before privatisation? Bear in mind that there are millions of them, and in most cases, I suspect the line from the exchange to the premises has not been replaced since privatisation.