OT - Cell Service - How They Do It in Europe

[Duncan MacGregor]

On February 29, 2008 01:33:43 pm James Knott wrote:
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > It seems strange that the phone market in europe is much better in the
> > private hands (although roaming charges are insane and being looked into
> > by regulators), while it was inefficient and expensive when it was
> > government run.  In north america privatization seems to have made
> > things worse in some cases, although not all.  It's not an overall
> > improvement in many cases though.  For some reason competition doesn't
> > seem to work out very well here.  It may just be the low population
> > density that is the problem.  It costs too much to startup a nation wide
> > service with not enough potential customers.
>
> For the most part, telecom in North America has alway been private,
> though a regulated monopoly.  Competition in the U.S. has had a much
> bigger impact than here.  Many services cost much less there, more than
> can be attributed to population density.  In fact, if you want a
> dedicated circuit from, for example, Toronto to Vancouver, it's much
> cheaper to go via U.S.  Even going across town is much cheaper in the U.S.

Inexpensive dedicated data lines had the  effect of preserving proprietary 
network protocols and their hardware. In Canada, only the biggest companies 
could afford dedicated lines, and shared lines and packet-switching gear was 
not supported by the big US hardware vendors. So we had the worst of both 
worlds. We mice tried to follow OSI networking until the Elephant farted and 
rolled over, leaving us and the world with TCP/IP.

We are seeing this again with cellphone technology. It seems clear that every 
serious businessman  wants a good environment for monopoly except when he is 
trying to compete with a larger player; then he wants a 'level playing 
field'. 

Remember when the Telcos swore that they all lost money on local telephone 
service?




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Duncan MacGregor    --- Toronto ---
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