http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/01 ... sion_hole/

That won't go down too well if that's how it turns out

BT will use any excuse to 'jack' up prices as they are losing customers hand over fist
and what has their pension problems got to do with their customer base, that's a management/company problem
just another private company trying to 'nationalise' its debt but still retain its 'private' company profits and keep bonus payments up for the management, BT = Bloody Tossers …

BT jacked up prices = Epic Fail

Epic Fail = customers going elsewhere.

BT couldn't be any shiftier unless maybe Mandy took over

He'd probably give 90% of your bandwidth to the record companies for them to use to track every file on your PC.

Unfortunately, that's not an option for the vast majority of people. Hands up who has actual cable, as opposed to a BT Wholesale product from a reseller? Not many of you I suspect.

Most companies have no cable of their own going to the door. Even where the exchange is LLU, it's still BT Openreach who maintain the line. If BT put the price up, so will Talktalk et al or they'll make a loss and go bust.

There will be no true competition until the majority of households have 2 or more cables running down their street. That would cost in excess of £100,000,000,000 to lay over 100,000,000 miles of cable and I don't see many people investing in a 20 to 50 year return right now. Most of us are stuck with that "up to" 100 year old corroded GPO copper for some time to come, unless we ditch the land line and go mobile.

Quite a few ISP have their own equipment in the exchanges rather than just buying the service from BT wholesale.

That's what LLU means.

As I said, it's still a BT Openreach van that comes to put the line in. It's still a BT Openreach engineer that fixes the line faults. It's still BT who set the larger portion of the cost.