Comment Articles

The Looking Glass world of telco deregulation

Peter Judge AnchorDesk

Published: 22 Jan 2002 16:35 GMT

The arrival of broadband technology round the world has turned into a complete farce. Here in the UK, users and service resellers are lobbying the regulator, Oftel, to force BT to bring prices of broadband to the levels enjoyed by our continental cousins. Meanwhile, last week in Germany, Deutsche Telekom responded to pressure from the German regulator, RegTP, to increase its DSL prices. The DSL roll-out in the US is littered with corporate corpses, and Europe is not far different -- only here, fewer companies got off the ground in the first place.

The strangest thing of all is that there are still DSL success stories being touted at conferences. Korea, Singapore, even dear old Kingston-upon-Hull in the UK are the darlings now. And how strange is that? It looks like these monopoly or near-monopoly players are making a far better job of delivering DSL than the major so-called "competitive" players.

Isn't that exactly the opposite of what we were told would happen?

A few years ago, the telecoms world experienced a worldwide wave of efforts to turn slow, monopolistic, government-backed PTTs into faster, more efficient, bodies, through the joint tools of privatisation and competition.

At the same time, people started talking about broadband, especially DSL, and the new fast access this technology would allow on the local loop.

It was only natural to expect these two things to work together. A new, more competitive environment would, surely, be one where broadband access would be rolled out quickly to end users. The hot breath of competitors at its heels would drive people like BT into a race to get hold of customer access accounts which might otherwise go elsewhere.