Broadband firms go to war with BT and Ofcom over competition

A furious row has broken out in the telecoms sector with more than a dozen companies banding together to denounce BT for holding �monopoly� power and accusing the regulator of failing to tackle competition issues in favour of crowd-pleasing consumer measures.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/medi...

If EE, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media et all don't like it, they can build their own infrastructure. Nothing there to stop them - however once they try they will start to realise what is involved and the actual costs.

That VM are one of the cabal is nothing short of a joke. VM refuses to allow others to use its ducts, refuses to wholesale its product and also refuses to expand its network bar a little tinkering at the edges.

It has always interested me that while everybody has access to BT equipment nobody has the same rights in East Yorkshire with the Kingston equipment.

In reply to a post by MCM:

That VM are one of the cabal is nothing short of a joke. VM refuses to allow others to use its ducts, refuses to wholesale its product and also refuses to expand its network bar a little tinkering at the edges.

Because they realise how much it would cost to expand and maintain. Yet VM expect BT to provide access to their equipment and services for next to nothing.

Because they realise how much it would cost to expand and maintain. Yet VM expect BT to provide access to their equipment and services for next to nothing.

Which is the point that I was making.

To be honest, I doubt many ISPs would consider it worthwhile given the limited size of the market. There's also the disproportionate cost of structuring Kingston services along wholesale lines like BT has had to do. It costs a lot of money to develop all the systems and mechanisms to present such services, along with all the structural re-organisations involved. BT can spread the cost over a huge infrastructure and revenue base, whilst Kingston have a much smaller one.

From the SPs point of view, it's yet another systems integration job with all the automated and manual interfaces, configuration management, problem management and much else. We already see this with the limited support for Openreach's GEA-FTTP services, despite them being close cousins to the FTTC ones. All this costs money for ISPs.

Incidentally, this is also an issue for altnets in receipt of public money (like Cotswold Broadband) , where open, wholesale service is mandated. Just how many ISPs will think it worthwhile to provide a retail service for a few thousand potential customers?