Here's a mad idea, Dougal..........

aidan_dunne

I don't know if this idea has ever been mentioned here before but if it has please forgive me for wasting precious forum space bringing it up again.

Now, we all know that Eircom controls all the phone lines in the country and will do everything in their power to hold onto that control (let's disregard LLU for the moment), so this idea I've been thinking about would never become reality, but we can all fantasise, can't we? lol

Anyway, here's my idea of how things should be done.

No one company should control the lines and also provide services on those lines. For arguments sake let's come up with an imaginary company called Irish Telecoms Services (I hope I'm not infringing on any copyright or anything here!). Now, ITS would have responsiblility for the servicing, maintenance, upgrading and general day-to-day operating of the phone lines in this country. However, they would not be allowed offer any services on these lines such as phone calls or internet access. As I said, the would only keep the lines working and up to scratch.

Then the various telecoms companys such as Eircom, Esat, Nevada, Worldcom, etc. would be the ones who offer the services on these lines. They would be responsible for providing phone call services and internet access using the ITS maintained phone lines. This would mean that there would be proper competition in the phone/internet market and that the various companies would have to price their services competitively but also provide better services to their customers and better customer support if they wanted to beat their rivals. This would be benificial to the customer as a whole because prices would come down due to the rivalry, yet the level of service would have to increase otherwise unhappy customers would just switch to a rival operator.

Now, I know what's going to be said: "But that's like LLU." But it's not. In the case of LLU, Eircom are letting the OLO's access the lines but they also offer services on those lines themselves. With my suggestion, no company controls the lines and is allowed offer services as well. The two things have to be seperate, therefore there can be no attempt by one single company to monopolise both the lines and telecoms services in this country.

I hope I've made my suggestion clear and I'd love to see what everybody else thinks of it. As I said at the beginning, this is just me fantasising and there would never be a chance something like this would happen (let's face it, can you honestly expect Eircom to give up their precious phone lines!) but I thought it was an interesting idea. What do you all think?

Jorinn

I've thought about that before but the problem I stumbled at was the implementation.

dahamsta

The suggestion has been made before Aidan, in a roundabout way, in that some of us believe that Eircom should be forced to divest themselves of their retail arm. In an ideal world, wholesale and retail would /never/ mix, because it creates an explicit conflict of interest. In Eircom's case, this is exaggerated even further because they have control of 99% of the local loop. No one company should be allowed control that proportion of a market, but if they are - perhaps because competition would be difficult to sustain in the relevant market[1] - they should be encouraged to deal wholesale only. If encouragement isn't enough, then it's time for legislation. We haven't even had encouragement, which is illustrative of the weak economic thinking of Fianna Fáil and the PD's. No preparation, no forward-thinking, no nothing. They're flying by the seat of their pants, and we're running out of fuel...

adam


[1] Most other infrastructures are good examples here: roads, water, electricity, etc - it's not commerically viable to have multiple infrastructures in sparsely populated areas.