BT and TalkTalk BOTH claim victory as Ofcom tackles fibre price row TalkTalk claims it has won a crucial battle in its war on BT's alleged stranglehold of Blighty's fibre broadband market. Today, Ofcom proposed regulating the way BT sets its prices for superfast broadband – to ensure there's an ample margin between the amount it charges ordinary folks and the amount it charges rival ISPs to …
A spokesman at the telecoms giant chided: "It’s like Spain’s manager saying they’ve had a good World Cup!"* He added to El Reg
Technically Spain did have a good world cup, they managed to qualify which is more than the majority of the world managed to do, they just had a pretty poor final stages, and by pretty poor I mean shocking. And by shocking I mean TalkTalk level of customer service shocking.
Ofcom noted that the superfast broadband market had significantly grown since the watchdog first told BT to offer other ISPs access to its fibre network.
Eh? Was there ever any doubt that BT would do that? BT Openreach developed its GEA product in conjunction with multiple CPs (including C&W and TalkTalk and Sky) so that was always going to be available to other companies. And of course if BT Wholesale didn't create a wholesale product for it there'd be little point in that division existing.
I'm therefore pretty sure that Ofcom did not 'tell BT to offer other ISPs access to its fibre network'. It was always going to happen. Right from day one.
"therefore allegedly using its dominant position as a former state monopoly to squeeze out the competition."
NO, NO, NO.
There was NEVER ANY fibre broadband when it was a state monopoly, so STOP using that as an excuse for not putting your own infrastructure in. Be honest. Say "We can't be arsed to put our own in, so we need to piggy back off someone elses"
Indeed not only is the existing ducting a major advantage to BT in terms of cost, since they just push the fibre through the same ducts, but in certain geographical locations it grants them an effective monopoly still.
There are a number of areas, particularly historic cities, where regulations and the location of listed buildings and archaeological sites etc don't practically allow for new ducts to be run and BT's already occupy the only available space.
The ducting etc down which the fibre travels, and the copper from the cabinets to the homes, was there when BT was a state monopoly.
Some of it was however a lot of homes and offices have been built and connected up since 1981. BT rebuilt the national network using fibre optic cables and upgraded all the exchanges to digital. It is solely responsible for rolling out three xDSL flavours and for maintaining the existing infrastructure.
I think it's unhelpful to keep harping on about what BT may or may not have started with. For damn' sure it's a far better network than it ever was in 1981. BT has stood on its own two feet for the last 33 years and deserves to be judged solely on that basis.
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