BT's monopoly stifles innovation, claim British telecom giants
news.techworld.com/networking/3588414/bts-mon...Posted Nov 24, 2014, 12:12 PM UTC
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We complain about things like this, and sure it could be improved. Yet I've been with BT for my phone line and broadband for many years now and when I compare my experience and service to the horror stories coming from some other countries I consider myself very lucky.
Switching to BT when I did it at least 8 years ago now was very easy, it only took 1 phone call with no fuss or hassle. They had an engineer our promptly and I was switched over very quickly. Since then they upgraded me to the 50mb download fibre with BT Infinity once they had installed it in my area and several months after that they once again upgraded me for free to the 75mb better version of Infinity once that was ready to go. Both times the Engineer arrived on time and was done quickly. No mess or fuss and like I said no cost.
I also moved house nearly a year ago and they simply transferred my existing deal to my new property. They had it done within 2 days all working perfectly.
On top of that I have never had issues with speed or poor performance and on the rare occassions where the net did drop out, it was always in the middle of the night (presumably the best time for maintenance) and it was always back up before expected.
So while I cannot comment on how much they may be affecting our industry as a whole, I can say I am more than pleased with their service.
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My girlfriend's been trying to get a broadband connection set up at her home, and has been completely fucked by BT customer service so many times. Somewhere in BT's system they have her address entered incorrectly. This means that whenever she tries to set up an internet service with any company, BT included, they cannot find her address, and therefore can't do anything for her.
She's been calling BT CS pretty much weekly to try and get someone there to correct it, but they keep passing the blame and doing nothing. At first they blamed other internet providers for having incorrect data. Then they blamed BT OpenReach (yep, another part of their own company) for having the incorrect data and refused to give any way to contact OpenReach - apparently individual customers aren't allowed to contact them directly, and said she'd have to make TalkTalk/Tesco/whoever she wanted internet with contact OpenReach about the error.
After a couple of months of this going nowhere, she contacted the complaints department (which she was told didn't exist by BT CS reps) about it, and someone finally admitted that BT had the information incorrect and that they would correct it. She's had to make the same call three times now, because they never actually correct it.
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I find it really odd at how some people like myself get fantastic service and are treat like valued customers and then other people have stories like yours. Where for no obvious reason they are treat like shit.
Weird.
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Plusnet are owned by BT, I wonder why they don't just expand the Plusnet way of thinking to their other ISP operation.
Plusnet aren't the best but they are nowhere near as bad as BT themselves are
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When we moved it was a fucking ordeal to get them to move our internet. Took nearly a month Despite us booking in advance. Not only that but they have charged for BT Sports, despite having Sky which grants youthe channel for free. Having to chase refunds is fucking interminable .
If the service wasn't reliable we'd have changed. The support has been nothing but terrible though
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I think Virgin can shut up. They want access to BT's ducts but have opposed any attempt by others to use their ducts and cable network.
As for the rest, if they wanted to build their own networks from scratch then there is nothing to stop them doing it - but they want duct access as it conveniently removes a lot of cost and hassle. This isn't the US where there's legislation to kill any competition.
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I think Virgin can shut up. They want access to BT's ducts but have opposed any attempt by others to use their ducts and cable network.
This.
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Why should Virgin do that though? They, a private company, built that infrastructure with their own money, they have no incentive or requirement to loan it out. BT's infrastructure, however, was built by the taxpayer before BT was privatised, so it should be open for everyone.
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Because BT's assets became private when BT was privatised in the 80s, with the taxpayer paid the then fair market rate for the assets and ducts, and since then has paid a gopping amount of taxes and invested in infrastructure on a purely private basis?
And if Virgin wants to use someone else's infrastructure they can hardly deny the same privilege to their own competition. It's hypocrisy
Both companies enjoyed former state sanctioned total monopolies - BT had the telco monopoly, and Virgin's constituent companies benefited from a monopoly on cable TV (BT was not allowed to enter that market) and HFC services
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The privatisation of BT was a disgrace. The government should own the lines and rent them to the company that can provide the best service. Those companies should then be responsible for upgrading the infrastructure. As it is BT get guaranteed revenue from line rentals to other companies. It's just free money. They don't have a proper incentive to improve the infrastructure. We are the America of Europe when it comes to the internet except we are a tiny country and nation wide fiber is so easily achievable by comparison. How we expect to compete when we are still using the copper wire pony express is beyond me.
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I'm pretty sure BT was Thatcher's first privatisation - whilst it wasn't perfect, I think the current situation with regulation and local loop unbundling has worked out very well indeed.
Before Thatcher BT was abysmal in many ways - there were mandatory phone handset rental charges, and no-one else but them was allowed to install extension wiring, which made it hideously expensive.
The way you outline is the way I'd suggest now, too, but arguably we didn't know any better in the 80's, because we didn't have any other privatisations to learn from.
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We've missed out massively on being able to roll out fibre optic broadband. We'd likely be a world leader at this point if it wasn't for privatisation. You might have seen some short term phone improvements but we're missing out now with how essential the internet is to commerce and daily life. Link
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BT wanted to do that in the 80's, the Thatcher government didn't want to invest in it.
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The government should own the lines and rent them to the company that can provide the best service. Those companies should then be responsible for upgrading the infrastructure.
And how exactly would that work? It certainly isn't the model practiced by any country I'm aware of, they all have one entity owning and upgrading the infrastructure while leasing it to others. This could be a private company like BT or a state owned operation like the Australian NBN
Would you want one company bidding to hold a monopoly on a given area of the country? It does sound a bit like the rail franchise model, where there is little or no competition between operators and little or no infrastructure upgrades being done by the infrastructure owner for the large part of the country. While I can get a decent internet service here in this part of rural England, my rail line is Victorian and has no plan to be upgraded, even if it falls into the sea again
We are the America of Europe when it comes to the internet except we are a tiny country and nation wide fiber is so easily achievable by comparison.
That's the most unaccurate and funniest thing I've read today. I'm reasonably sure that countries with similar demographics (so no tiny city-states or urbanised Romania) have gone down similar routes to us. Germany, for example, uses just as much FTTC and VDSL as we do. If you believe that every other country in the world has 100% fibre to the premises and we're the only one who doesn't, you're mistaken
As for "ease", we are a small but densely populated country - it's not easy, and it isn't cheap, but would probably be doable if the government committed to it. £50bn is going to be spent on HS2, that would probably build a decent fibre to the premises network. The government would rather give a tiny fraction of this to BT and set it a pitiful 2Mbps target.
How we expect to compete when we are still using the copper wire pony express is beyond me.
dat hyperbole
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We are the America of Europe when it comes to the internet except we are a tiny country and nation wide fiber is so easily achievable by comparison.
There are many national fibre networks. BT, Vodafone, National Rail, COLT, Virgin Media, Surf Telecoms, Easynet and others.
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Have an upvote for your industry knowledge; Surf only has about 100 employees overall
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Are they hiring?
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Rumour is they will be soon; keep an eye on the Western Power Careers website
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I love how everyone on Reddit says how crap and incompetent the government are but yet expects them to be able to run a myriad of services better than private sector.
Yes regulation and anti monopoly laws but I'm not on board with this theory that public bodies can magically run everything more Smoothly.
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BT was privatised in 1984, 30 years ago. The various regulators have hamstrung BT with internal structures and firewalls to allow others to compete.
If all those telecoms companies have failed to invest in their own infrastructure in that time then they have no one else to blame but themselves.
For those that are complaining about fibre to the premises, well in late eighties BT was THE world leader for fibre R&D. Thatcher killed it, and sold of the companies because apparently it was monopolistic and anti competitive:
http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
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In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper...
I'd be interested in seeing the cost breakdown, the fundamental problem with fibre rollout is the expense.
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Y'know what? I don't feel like I have enough information to make an informed opinion on this subject.
On the one hand, it seems like the various members of the UKCTA have an enormous stake in this, regardless of whether that's the right thing for consumers.
On the other hand, BT is legendarily incompetent, and as such they might have a very fair case for being allowed to build their own infrastructure.
The truth is, the reality is probably somewhere between the two, and I don't trust this source enough to provide me with a fair assessment of the situation.
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I'd agree somewhat. BT retail, the BT that people love to hate is fantastically crap, but BT Wholesale and Openreach are fairly competent. Even Plusnet are much better than BT Retail and that's another ISP owned by BT
My main complaint with BT is really their lack of will to roll out FTTP with taxpayer funding, preferring a much cheaper solution with no future proofing (and where they are doing FTTP, it seems to be totally random - I've seen rural farmhouses with no neighbours that can get FTTP, and long streets suffering from shit speeds on FTTC).
Some attempts to do without BT have failed - for example Digital Region in Yorkshire, which basically built the same type of network as BT did, but with nowhere near the same support from ISPs - it was unpopular, none of the big ISPs signed up to use it and eventually it got shut down.
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Can't wait for BT to buy up O2...
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Full circle...
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No chance of that, Sky bought them a few years back. O2 were brilliant, not the cheapest but never had a problem that couldn't be fixed in 5 minutes by helpful staff.
EDIT: Didn't realise they were on about the phone side.
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I loved my O2 broadband until one of the customer service staff cancelled our direct debit. We rang up to set it up again and O2 kept trying but saying my bank had refused it. My bank kept saying O2 hadn't requested it. That went on for about a year with me having to call and pay over the phone each month before I finally jumped ship to BT Fibre.
The service up until that point with O2 was brilliant though and for the price I definitely couldn't have found anything better.
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The arrangement between bt and open reach is a joke.
I moved into a brand new flat a year ago, near the middle of Edinburgh and inside a FTTC area. A year later I can not get any explanation as to why the flats I'm in do not have fibre when the rest of the street does.
Bt say I need to ask openreach who as far as I can tell will not talk to end users.
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I live in a new build estate, the houses that were here before my estate was built have fiber, we do not and the open reach site just says coming soon. Also, no chance of fiber with Virgin as there are no lines down.
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It's so insane. I don't even get anything from open reach. There website just tells me that fibre is available and to contact my isp. Grrrrr
If you check the cabinet checker which doesn't seem to be linked publicly anywhere it confirms no fttc.
Oh and more personal then a development issue but I bought a 4th floor flat and apparently virgin no longer installs to the 4th floor because of health and safety.
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It also called on Ofcom to let them use their own equipment to power BT’s fibre
That sounds like really anti-competitive beahviour. So we get a group of privately owned companies mish-mashing with each other?
I think the fact we see BT, Plusnet, EE, O2, Zen, TalkTalk and even Waitrose doing as well as companies that don't use Openreach such as Virgin Media is a testement to how well regulated the market is.
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I'm interested in seeing FTTH rolled out in as much of the country as possible, if that can be considered innovation?
Perhaps(?) one interesting example is Spain which expects to have 80% FTTH coverage fairly soon. I haven't managed to get to the bottom of how an economic basket case like Spain managed to achieve this "miracle" but one theory expounded here suggests that giving the national telecoms incumbent an "unfair" advantage forces competitors to innovate - in this case build FTTH networks. No idea whether it would work here.
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The government could have got BT to do more FTTP by not requiring some piss poor 2Mbps target with the public funding, but since BT is only required to do 2Mbps, they'll use ADSL and VDSL from street cabinets which will achieve it for most people (the rest can have subsidised 4G or satellite).
Cornwall seems to have a lot more FTTP than most but even here, the decision over who gets FTTP and who gets FTTC is really random
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Do you mean FTTP?
FTTC is cabinet, P is premises. H is uh? House?
To be honest I'm pretty happy with my FTTC, would like to get FTTP though, national gigabit network would be beneficial imo, as you can't air 4k signals, just not enough bandwidth.
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In the BT world, they are interchangable
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BT Doesn't Stifle anything. Pretty sure Sky, Talktalk, thisisp can start there own backbones if they want. Everyone just runs of BT Lines.
Tbh, BT is doing an Okay job. Not the best but not the worse. At least we are not in America.
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Not being as bad as someone else isn't a good reason to accept something being shit
It is when you are a business.