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by pjc50
1390 days ago
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The UK system is .. better than nothing, but as you say almost all the hardware is owned by Openreach. So if there's a fault it collapses into a finger-pointing game. And the underlying cost of the hardware and operations to support it is the same. So what is an ISP? Well, it's like an electricity "supplier" in the UK (eg Bulb passim): it's a thin shell company that buys in a wholesale market and sells to the retail one, while running a call centre to deal with the annoying retail customers. Some people have called this the "playing at shops" theory of market operation. |
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The UK has leaned more towards the pretend visible competition and underinvestment behind the scenes while allowing profiteering, but even within that there's some room for innovation.
Really boring improvements like saving money on admin by getting customers to pay via Direct Debit or using the internet for customer service were often pioneered by small companies which then forced others to follow to compete. Could a well run nationalised company have done that too. Yes, but they'd have been sabotaged and attacked for political reasons, so in reality its possibly an okay compromise.
Bulb is a good example. Good customer service, non predatory pricing, supporting renewables. Broken by weirdly anti-market moves from a conservative government to patch up other anti-market decisions they'd made to subsidize fossil fuels.