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Rip-Off Britain? February
2001
A surprise report from Oftel proclaims that
the UK offers cheap access.
The outgoing ombudsman, Oftel, which is to be replaced
by an overall communications regulator, has made the surprise claim
that telecommunications in Britain are amongst the cheapest in the
world.
A survey benchmarking costs and prices for access
across Europe and the US (with special regard to Ohio and California)
concluded that Britain has the second-cheapest off-peak, residential
access, with only California offering access for less to home users.
For businesses, the picture is less appealing, with the UK having
the second-most expensive unmetered access (such as fixed line or
ISDN) but still the cheapest metered access in Europe.
While some have been sceptical of the report, full
details are available from Oftel.
Certainly many of the companies which attempted to kickstart unmetered
access in the UK have blamed BT for their woes over the past six
months, including AltaVista, which
prompted the rush for free access last year. One of the leaders
of unmetered provision, Breathe, which claimed that BT's pricing
structure made it unprofitable to continue, has recently been bought
out by Great Universal Stores (GUS), the company that has been mopping
up a considerable number of failing dotcoms after it acquired Jungle.com
in October.
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