James Salisbury nntp.dsl.pipex.com
wibbled on Tuesday 10 November 2009 21:05


Yes you are missing something. Work out how much it costs to provide
that cable, and who paid for it. It was explained to me by a BT manager
it can take some years before a line returns a profit.

Yes - but the lifetime of the cable should be quite a lot longer. I think it
would be quite reasonable to get a single[1] line installed for nowt on the
expectation that BT *will* derive a profit from it in the medium term. The
number of cases of someone installing a line, then lapsing it after a
couple of years must be quite small.

[1] I can understand a case of charging if one customer wants more than one
line as the probability of a future encumbent using and paying line
rental[2] on those lines is also perhaps small.

[2] My reasoning is that you have to pay line rental anyway - guaranteed
revenue even if you make sod all calls. To draw a parallel, you don't pay
the car hire place to buy their new cars - that's factored into the rent
you and all future hirers pay.

--
Tim Watts

This space intentionally left blank...