Cable Forum - View Single Post - VM refuse to sign up to Ofcom code to protect loyal customers..

jfman · 24-10-2020, 22:16

It's important that the market is suitably regulated - there isn't genuine competition in the broadband/TV markets - although the latter is improving. The vast majority of people have the choice of one (if at all) 100MBPS+ provider be that Virgin or an Openreach product resold, plus smaller networks have their own build.

However, while regulation is desirable, it's isn't reasonable to essentially enforce flat pricing and eliminate 'new customer discounts' that are a bread and butter feature of many markets. Or even just any discretionary discounts.

The reality is the 4,000,001st customer costs a lot less to supply in terms of marginal cost than the average cost of providing everyone - which gives scope for discounting. More customers on the network means more to recover the fixed costs from.

And as said above - flat pricing would find itself near or at the standard pricing across the industry.

24-10-2020, 22:16	#5
jfman Architect of Ideas Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 10,337	Re: VM refuse to sign up to Ofcom code to protect loyal customers.. It's important that the market is suitably regulated - there isn't genuine competition in the broadband/TV markets - although the latter is improving. The vast majority of people have the choice of one (if at all) 100MBPS+ provider be that Virgin or an Openreach product resold, plus smaller networks have their own build. However, while regulation is desirable, it's isn't reasonable to essentially enforce flat pricing and eliminate 'new customer discounts' that are a bread and butter feature of many markets. Or even just any discretionary discounts. The reality is the 4,000,001st customer costs a lot less to supply in terms of marginal cost than the average cost of providing everyone - which gives scope for discounting. More customers on the network means more to recover the fixed costs from. And as said above - flat pricing would find itself near or at the standard pricing across the industry.