121–130 of 145 posts
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BT Infinity (40Mbps down, 10 up) is £18 a month with a 40GB cap and £25.60 for unlimited.
Thank you, as much I tried to resist believing it...the grass certainly is greener on the other side.
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It isnt truly a case of everyone wins, consumers still need to pay ridiculous reconnection fees (these are typically £100 - £300, despite the fact there was an active line before you moved in) As well as being forced to pay line rental (£8-£15pm) for a bt phone line despite no intention of ever making any calls. BT definitely won out of it, not sure anyone else did.
On the subject of connection fees: "If a connection charge applies most people find they don't need to pay this it costs £30 if you're just taking a BT line or free with any broadband package." From: http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displ... I'm pretty sure we didn't pay anything when we moved a while back.
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It isnt truly a case of everyone wins, consumers still need to pay ridiculous reconnection fees (these are typically £100 - £300, despite the fact there was an active line before you moved in) As well as being forced to pay line rental (£8-£15pm) for a bt phone line despite no intention of ever making any calls. BT definitely won out of it, not sure anyone else did.
Yep, i actually get charged a fee on top of my line rental because i dont make phone calls on it. I despise that i have to pay BT line rental then pay broadband from my other provider. I'd like to see 1 fee from my ISP of choice including line rental, just to make things simplier even if its the same price.
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Want to put a dollar figure on the Enron/Worldcom implosions? How about if we threw a couple of those into the 2008 disaster, same time as Lehman collapsed? What's the cost there? People are really, really bad at pricing catastrophic events. Not to say that the bill couldn't be cleaned up, probably. But the conservative half of the aisle seems to be more interested in talkshow ideological invective than sucker's game…
First, you assume without proof that Sarbanes-Oxley will actually prevent the next Enron. Goals aren't results. I do not accept this as unarguably obvious. The rule of thumb is that it is easier to undetectably game complex systems than simple ones. Second, you've not mentioned the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley has real costs, not just in terms of direct compliance but also the business that they've simply shut out in adv…
To liberals they are. Go read Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed.
In the "Need to Know" version of this story they talked with a BT representative about how things had worked out for BT after they were forced into local loop unbundling. It worked out great for BT. They make more money leasing out the lines and leasing out space in their switching centers for the third party ISP's equipment than they were making providing monopoly ISP services directly. It truly is a case of everyon…
BT wholesale will only allow approved parties to enter their premises. AFAIK only BT retail and Alcatel are on the list of approve maintainers.
So third-party ISPs are forced to pay extortionate fees to Alcatel who get to make more on-site vists (and charge more) if they make more mistakes.
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>... after creating monopolies in the first place If you are really trying to advance the theory that "the market", left to itself, won't generate monopoly after monopoly, perhaps you could point us to actual examples of those golden times when the absence of regulation served consumers more than they served business oligarchy.
Properly speaking, the concept "monopoly" properly pertains only to situations where the government enforces the monopoly. This is the original meaning of the word (before it was altered in the 19th and 20th centuries). There is no proper political right for a "consumer" to have a choice between multiple brands of a product. If there were such a right, it would be violated the moment they walked into a remote store t…
I'd love to see where you got that idea because it isn't true.
The first use of the word was by Aristotle, where he describes Thales of Miletus' (who was a private citizen) cornering of the market in olive presses as a monopoly[1]
It's true that later there were some government sanctioned monopolies, but it is a mischaracterization to say that the word's meaning has ever changed. It was well understood then that there were monopolies that weren't sanctioned by the government (eg, the guild system in Europe).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Historical_monopolies
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> Most of the phone companies were Ma Bell, which had a government-sanctioned natural monopoly from 1936 to its breakup in 1984. If it was natural, why was a government sanction necessary?
> If it was natural, why was a government sanction necessary? Govt likes monopolies and companies like to have govt keep out competition, which is what the govt did for AT&T. Interestingly enough, AT&T had been a govt monopoly well before 1936 and then lost that and regained it again in 1936. AT&T loved being a monopoly.
A natural monopoly means that competitors are kept out naturally. No government intervention would be needed.
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You mean the governments that constrain through force the market so that only a few monopolistic entities are present?
You don't need government to do anything to end up with monopolies, especially in activities with very high cost-of-entry such as utilities or telecommunications. Ma Bell became a natural monopoly all on its own, and barring an extremely disruptive entry into the market (which is, again, extremely difficult in high-entry-cost markets since the rate of new entry is so low) it will consolidate over time as the current…
1. They supply the market demand perfectly. 2. Government forces them into that position directly or indirectly.
There are no exceptions.