What’s interesting about this article is that it lays the blame with anti-Trust actions.
The article argues that BT and AT&T if they were allowed to keep their monopolies would have allowed the UK and US to have far greater internet speeds via massive fiber deployments.
I have always seen monopolies as harming consumers and more competition as being beneficial, but this is an interesting observation.
Ok, I guess I was looking at it wrong.I was thinking about government-granted monopolies where the government willingly prevents competition. It is my understanding that this was how of most of the telecommunication companies around the world started.
That's quite a different posture though. BT was a government owned corp, and when it was privatized, investors bought it subject to the restrictions in its license. In comparison, the cable companies built their infrastructure against the backdrop of deregulation, in which it was illegal for them to be granted exclusive franchises.
For example, in Ukraine was state monopoly Ukrtelecom, and government constantly conducted policy, to prohibit private companies use technologies newer than in Ukrtelecom.
Because of this, before revolution in 2004, Ukraine has very slow internet (private companies allowed only 64k private channel abroad - more only from Ukrtelecom); than 3G was slowed, because only Ukrtelecom got licence.
Also there was many smaller law limitations in favor of UT.
Nice comment, thanks. GigaClear etc are new to me. I left the UK 5 years ago, but was heavily involved in the telco business. Agree with your statement (and benefits) of heavily and fairly regulated monopolies.
There is some theoretic academic suppport for tight regulation of the "natural monopoly" parts of the network and allowing competition on top of that.
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.
Which is what a lot of ex telecoms monopolies are doing as they cant really grow organically anymore another example is BT sport funny how Murdoch's press started bashing BT after they started competing with Sky
Well it was also possible as most European companies had state-run telephone monopolies into the 1980s. And when they were privatised the government's were in a position to impose rules on the newly created private companies - namely that they had to sell local access to competitors.
As the US govt. didn't own AT&T, not the Baby Bells, nor today's Verizon & AT&T, the situation is a bit different.
The irony that the US has a much worse situation because there is so much less competition (despite it being the home of capatalism).
In terms of speed I know Ireland (where I am,) and the UK can both get you VDSL2+ service (so like up to 80Mb) on copper pair from numerous suppliers. One service slow access to netflix? Go to another.
I don't think price fixing qualifies as enabling competition. You mention a choice of providers, versus I guess previously only having the choice of BT's monopoly? So, government already creates this telecom monopoly then breaks it up a bit, uh no that doesn't work at all sorry. Absent regulation, I have all the choice in the world.
That's not a very good example. Communications is a natural monopoly - the barrier to entry in regional markets lends to less competition naturally. It's why most governments manage their natural monopolies to keep costs down.
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