Anthony Bouttell wrote:
> 
> This may not be the most appropriate place to ask this question but:
> 
> I notice that quite a few of the users are from Europe and I was
> wondering how you tele-comm charges compare to mine, ( Canada ).
> 
> I use a cable modem ( up to 500 Kbs ) and it smokes!!
> I get charged $55 per. month for 1Gbyte of traffic and 24hr/day
> connect time, ( this is cool because I can connect to my home machine
> from work) + 3-Email addresses and 5mbytes of storage on the providers
> server.
> 
> I've heard most that most of the users in Europe are basically screwed
> blue by their telecomms. Is this true ? How do my charges compare to
> yours ? What about the US, how do your charges compare ?

Hello from sunny Dublin, Ireland!

You probably won't believe this, but...

(FYI:  Today, 1 Irish Pound = 1.38 US Dollars  Sorry, don't have the
rate for Canadian dollars to hand!)

I pay 10 pounds per month + 21% VAT (sales tax) to my ISP for dial-up
access.  That's the going rate in the Irish market, where
the two biggest ISPs are owned by the telephone company and the
postal service, both of which are state-owned monopolies in their
core business areas.  My ISP supports up 33.6K modems at present;
some of the smaller ISPs support 56K access.

Evenings and weekends, my connection costs me about 50 pence
(70 US cents) per hour in call charges, as that's the rate for
local phone calls.  I don't use the account during business hours,
when it probably costs more like a pound an hour.  (I believe that
free local calls are common in some parts of the US; they are
unheard of here, and rare elsewhere in Europe AFAIK.)

The standard ISP account here gives you one email account and some
free web space - 5MB is about the norm these days, though the limit
is often not enforced as most users never use any of their allotted
space.

Dublin city has a single cable TV operator with an amazing 90 percent
of households connected, but they don't offer cable modems.  The fact
that the telephone company owns 75% of the cable company, and
publicly admits that it bought that stake to prevent the cable
company competing for telephone subscribers, may have something to
do with the late appearence of cable modems (or anything else
beyond basic cable TV) in this country... ;-)

In the interests of fairness I should say that Ireland has one of
the most modern telephone systems in europe, with very good line
quality and reliability.  The problems for consumers are mostly
of a commercial nature, not technical, and some progress is being
made in the commercial side of things. The government has instructed
the telephone company to sell its stake in the cable company by the
end of this year.  There is real competition between the mobile phone
networks, only one of which is owned by the state telco.  There is
competition also in the commercial comms sector, and the monopoly
that the state-owned company has on the residential sector will come
to an end in 1999.

AFAIK, the situation in many European countries is similar, though
they are at various stages in the process.  At one time, almost all
had a state-owned monopoly running their telephone networks, and
charging much more than would be expected in the US.  Increasingly
the markets are being deregulated and more operators are moving in,
bring competition and a subsequent drop in prices.

I was living in the UK when the market there was opened up to
competition a few years ago.  The existing monopoly (British Telecom)
had been saying for years that their charges were as low as they
could possibly be while maintaining an adequate service, and that
the UK market could not support two telephone companies without
higher charges and poorer service.  Within six months of the first
commercial operator (Mercury Communications) starting in business,
British Telecom's charges had dropped by 40 percent on average,
and BT is now a highly-profitable company that trades on the stock
market.  Service quality is better than ever, as well...

Sorry if this posting has been excessively long (and off-topic!).
As you can probably tell, this is a pet subject of mine.

Happy Tracing!

Lorcan Hamill

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