Re: Could it have been fixed

On 10 Jan, 11:04, Chris Tolley <cj...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Indeed. Would BT have been so successful if privatised on the same model
as the railways, where one company ("Phoneline") ran the network, while
subscribers had to make arrangements with different franchised operators
(pun intended) depending on the location of the person they were
calling?

But you're talking about Luko's vision of a privatised railway, not
the real thing. In the real thing, the customer doesn't need to know
that they're dealing with different franchised operators, because
there's an integrated national ticketing, timetabling and booking
system.

Give me a bit more credit than that. I've been to Switzerland too. ;-)

OK, that was an unfair jibe - but ticketing in the UK is company-
neutral barring a few weird exceptions (sometimes, as in integrated
single-company networks, slow trains have cheaper tickets than fast
trains, and sometimes, as abroad, you can make a cheaper reservation
on a specific service at a specific time, but aside from the bizarre
competition between FCC and SN for Gatwick I can't think of many
routes where it gets much more complex than that).

Obviously comparing something tangible like rail travel to something
intangible like phone calls is difficult - but if you phone my mobile
from your TalkTalk landline, you are in a contract with Carphone
Warehouse but are dependent on BT and T-Mobile to actually provide the
service.

(also, Switzerland is a pretty good example of somewhere where despite
having a plethora of state-owned and private providers, network
integration is extremely effective...)

This is directly analogous to BT: Openreach (which owns the cables to
your house) is a legally and administratively separate company with
regulated tariffs, which sells space on its infrastructure to BT
Retail (which is the company that bills you if you have a 'normal' BT
phone line) as well as external phone and broadband providers.

Mebb that's how it has (and would have) settled down. But there would
have been years of getting multiple bills per quarter until someone (who
could do something to stop it, as opposed to merely the poor users of
the system) figured out how silly it was.

Not sure about that. Electricity privatisation (which was earlier than
rail privatisation) brought in the billing/infrastructure split
straight away, and the problems associated with that were pretty
limited.

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org
.

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