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Originally Posted by andyl
Gareth, I was talking about the existing ads and despite posts from your good self and others I still don't really understand. To be fair, I am a bit thick. I can see we have two technologies s at work but if AOL can use NTL's network, and Freeserve planned to, presumably this is not insurmountable - and why rival companies want to gain access as reported in that Guardian article.
Yours,
Confused of Bury.
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Basically, the way it works is that the ISP that wants to add users to the NTL network buys bandwidth on that network I suspect it works in a similar way to BT's standard ADSL product. With that, ISPs buy access for so many users. They then add their own costs, plus a profit marging to that cost and re-sell that bandwidth to the user.
AOL has as far as I understand, bought bandwidth on NTL's network. Freeswerve (or wanado as they are now) tried to, but the deal fell through for some reason.
NTL are clearly quite happy for other ISPs to use their bandwidth (as happens with AOL). Maybe most ISPs are happy dealing purely with BT, and moving toward LLU (installing their own equipment in Exchanges). Maybe BT has written something into their contracts with ADSL ISPs that the ISPs will not deal with any other comms company? If that were the case, few ISPs would be large enough to challenge BT.
The truth is that we don't know.
As it happens, I agree with Chris T. BT was a monopoly created with taxpayer's money. Their network was built with our money. I'll admit a lot of the "back end" stuff in the network (exchanges, trunk links etc) has been upgraded with private money, but most of the actual copper wiring into people's homes and business was done with taxpayer's money.
BT are still in a dominant position today. It's right that the government forces them to open their network (as people will tell you, they need to be forced).
NTL & Telewest are different. Yes, they are huge. However, their networks always were and still are privately funded. It should be up to them what they do with them.