UK ISP - BT Near To A Price Drop

[GhostShip]

At last folks The monopoly service provider in the UK is near to meeting the unbundling quota that will allow it to cut its prices, they had been previously fixed to keep a share of the market open for competition.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6128788.stm

British Telecom has been celebrating a somewhat unusual milestone - handing over control of one million of its telephone lines to its competitors.
Regulator Ofcom has forced BT to open up its exchanges to rivals to give the UK a more competitive broadband market.
When the telecoms giant has handed over 1.5 million lines, it will be allowed to cut broadband prices.

BT's handling of the process - known as local loop unbundling - has been criticised by some broadband providers.
By helping to release its stranglehold on the UK broadband market, BT will earn the right to reduce prices.

This should be good news for consumers and will allow it to compete with cut-price offers from the likes of firms such as Carphone Warehouse which already takes advantage of local loop unbundling (LLU).
The LLU process is important because it gives rivals to BT control of the last mile of copper wire which runs from telephone exchanges to homes, allowing them to offer faster, cheaper and more innovative broadband services

Its nice to see some benefit coming at last from OFTEL's competitive marketing manouveres but I do think we should hold off on the celebrations till we actually see some prices drop 

[KM]

erm, that is a bad thing...

the reason BT are celebrating it is because they want to drop their prices, they want to crush the competitors by making a loss just like they have always done to maintain their monopoly.

the only reason there are any competitors is because of the ruling that BT were allowed to put up their prices on the condition that they locked them there and would not reduce them, this then allowed competitors to operate - prior to this many companies tried, but BT just dropped prices in that area knocked them out of business and then put prices back up again

all this will do is knock out all of the competition again, every single exchange with a rival operator on it will have BT making a loss selling cheaper than the competitors, the competitors will go out of business, BT will put prices back up, and then you'll be stuck with things even more expensive than they are now, and nobody to turn to

the only competitors with any chance of survival are NTL:Telewest, and they wouldn't have stood a chance without the recent merger - nobody else is set to survive BTs being allowed to take over again, and i doubt NTL:Telewest will make it through without being seriously hurt

you are celebrating handing the monopoly back over to BT, you sure you want that? I certainly don't