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Authored by: Wol on Friday, June 21 2013 @ 10:01 AM EDT |
Maybe the US should copy us ... make AT&T whoever split off the "last
mile" as a "fabric maintenance company".
When it started there were a lot of companies who provided backhaul bulk calls
but you needed to pay line rental to BT. Now it's a lot better in that the
competing telcos can install their own backhaul equipment in the exchanges.
Openreach is the company that maintains "the last mile" and charges
the telcos, who pass the charge on to their customers.
So my in-laws, who use TalkTalk, think that TT provide everything. In reality
their calls are backhauled over the TT network, but their phone line is owned
and maintained by Openreach (which is a BT subsidiary) who charge TT not my
in-laws for it.
And there are several instances recently where people have taken over their
local exchange to make a small local company. Some "backwoods rural"
village in Oxfordshire (ie really only a couple of miles from London) were told
they couldn't have broadband because they were so remote. So the villagers got
together, bought out the switch box in their village, and paid for it to be
linked by fibre into the backhaul network. So the village got its own little
telco providing high-speed broadband!
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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