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Old 23rd November 2019, 19:45   #7
SideValve
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I agree about the Free Broadband sounding like a gimmick. There is very little that was actually free even in the days when we owned the providers.
But it makes no sense to have a competitive market on things that have to be delivered to every house. 1. to be independently delivered it means each provider delivering multiple channels down each street. 2. if run over a common infrastructure you are then splitting the provision in an unnatural way when vertical economies of scale make more sense and 3. delivery in high density areas is more cost effective and you end up with lots of competition while delivery in remoter areas is not cost effective and gets neglected resulting in very expensive services or none at all. The same logic applies to lots of things - post, telephone line, broadband, bus services, mobile phone services, roads, rail, gas, electricity etc etc. We are currently paying for a very inefficient system. And yes, it does provide more jobs duplicating everything but the consumer is paying for that and, ideally, if these things were done more efficiently we could afford to provide more of some of the services we've cut recently - which would provide more jobs.
If we had a publicly owned system that involved multiple entities laying multiple cables etc all over the shop and employing more people than necessary to provide only subtly different services to neighbours we'd be in uproar about it. That we're taxed a £15 a month (ish) to use the road system grates, if we're being taxed £30 or whatever a month to receive broadband it would really grate yet many pay that happily to a private provider. We are odd creatures.
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