Installing and newbies

[Derek Broughton]

Neil Winchurst wrote:

> Well, for my money, BT has been a problem from the start.
> Originally all forms of communication were run by the GPO (anyone
> remember them?)

Of course - that's all there was when I left...

> including phones. It was a government company so they 
> didn't have to worry about profits, shareholders etc.
> 
> Then the government of the day split the GPO into two which became
> Royal Mail and British Telecom. So now we had a private company
> running the phone systems for the country. IMHO that was crazy.
> 
> Again, in my opinion, BT have been holding the country back for
> years, which is the main reason that we are so far behind many other
> western European countries. In France, so my friends tell me, never
> mind 8 Mb broadband, 24 Mb has been around for years.

I'm no fan of rampant privatization, but whether you can get broadband has
got nothing to do with whether the phone system is in the hands of private
corporations or the government - most of North America has _always_ had
private phone companies and almost all of it is private now, and all of our
cities can manage at least 10Mbps.  Don't you have cable companies?  One of
the biggest reasons why we get decent urban service is that the cable
companies compete with the phone companies (which doesn't help me in the
middle of nowhere...).
-- 
derek