The UK has a new "Telecoms Consumer Charter".

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

The UK has a new "Telecoms Consumer Charter".

A cynic might see this as an attempt to deal with the adverse reaction to the concerns raised when some providers recently increased the amount of their "in-contract price rises".

Telecoms Consumer Charter

GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@neil

I started paying for a phone line when I was a student. Actually, I started paying for a broadband connection, but it came with a a telephone line bundled. This was with NTL, which was later bought by Virgin Media.

I stayed using them until we bought this house about eight years ago. Every year I was with them, either the speed increased or the price went down. I started paying for their 1Mb/s service. It was their most expensive offering. I stayed on their most expensive offering until it became 30 Mb/s (for the same price). Then the speed stayed the same but the price went down until I was on their cheapest offering. They were constantly doing network upgrades and the cost of providing the service went down. They were competing directly with ADSL providers.

When we moved here, it was a new build with OpenReach FTTP but no other options. We went with BT for broadband and got their 900 Mb/s connection (which, stupidly, isn't symmetric, and they don't plan on offering symmetric connections even after they move to intrinsically symmetric technology: their trialed 3.3 Gb/s downstream has 330 Mb/s upstream: I have no need of that much downstream, but could easily make use of more upstream).

Every year, they put the price up, until last year when they did a big price drop that took it about 20% below what we were paying when we moved in.

Mobile phones were the same. I got a mobile phone in the late '90s and jumped a bit between plans. Each one was cheaper than the last until I ended up on Three's 1-2-3 plan (1p/MB of data, 2p/text, 3p/minute for calls). A few years ago, they discontinued this plan and had a 10x jump in price and dialed back the free international roaming.

This kind of thing should drop in price over time. The infrastructure cost is sunk and paid off for the old standards. If you're rolling out the new standards, they're cheaper per unit data transfer, so offering the same connectivity costs less.

But there's been so much consolidation that the cost savings aren't passed on to customers because there's no competition. It's a market in dire need of regulation (or nationalisation).