BT's great broadband scam

Or alternatively, how the government's dogmatic adherence to 'competition is best' cost us all a billion pounds, which BT then threw at Premier league Football...

Given the importance of the network backbone why don't they give BT an order to split the network so that the core backbone to exchanges is separate to every other part of the group. Then if they fail to increase speeds to every exchange then the backbone is nationalised.

Same as just about every other contract the government signs it seems.

Governments are really bad at negotiating contracts, probably because they either have no idea of what they want or super stupid.

Or because the minister in charge changes half way through the procurement process and tells them to add/remove stuff at a whim. Or because the Daily Mail raises a fuss and the people in charge are too weak to tell them to eff off.

The inherent problem with public services is not that they are by definition more inefficient or less competent than private corporations (there are as many examples that disprove the theorem as prove it) but that being 'public' they are subject to political processes that private business simply isn't. The main failing with public service outsourcing is the failure to realise that it inevitably subjects the private corporation who is outsourced to to those same political pressures. The ability of the outsourcer to mitigate that pressure can have a large effect on the success of the project.

The notion that BT won't discuss parts of the contract with the other party in the contract is laughable though.

I've had to ditch adsl for 3G. 0.2meg vs 3-7 meg is no contest. Shame it's a bit flaky, but at least when it does work it's useable.

I think that they will claim commercial confidentiality. In fact there should be immediate termination of any contract if a government contractor claims commercial confidentiality. Look at the disasters of G4S at the Olympics and ATOS with the disability screenings.

I'm hoping our exchange gets it's Fibre to Cabinet upgrade next month.

Absolutely no chance of that ever happening to me. And think of all the urbanites my taxes help out

I am in a semi rural area but get a solid 14 Mbps so personally I think that people in black spots such as your self should be given priority over areas like mine.

Even urban areas can be bad. The last house I rented, even though it was in a city suburb, could only get 512kb.

They probably should have priority over all other areas as it would provide the biggest improvements for more people than rural areas.


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