Unbundling could cost you £125

Unbundled ISPs are more popular than ever with Sky announcing rapid growth of its broadband service. What they don't tell you is that you could be stung with a £125 charge if you opt for a fully unbundled service. In some cases, if a customer wants to switch back to a BT reseller ISP, or to another fully unbundled ISP*, BT …

[Anonymous Coward]

Confusing?

Ok so the charge is from BT, who have said it is their intention for this to be free.. yet their systems are complicated and the change is taking some time.. right so far?

If thats the case should this be titled "Tiscali's stealth unbundling programme could have you ripped off by BT?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Fair - Fair Trade Broadband Required

So basically if you are moved on to LLU, you will have paid twice for connection to broadband.

When I was connectwed we had to pay approximately 75 UKP for the privilege.

[Chris Williams]

Re: Confusing?

You're correct, it's a BT charge, but what it actually means is that because of the way the market works (or doesn't work) people don't know what's coming. Everyone is at fault - Ofcom, BT and the unbundler.

Everyone in the industry knows about the charge but they leave consumers to carry the can one way or another.

[amanfromMars]

Costly Ofcom Bundle Bungle?

"It is one of a number of complex changes arising from BT Retail's adoption of a new IT system to comply with its commitment to the regulator, Ofcom." ...... Does that then make Ofcom liable to pay any necessary Reconnection Fee?

[Chad H.]

Simple solution.

Forward the invoice for £125 to Tiscalli via recorded delivery. They caused the problem, they can pay for the solution.

[Dave Bell]

How do we know what we have?

Since Tiscali, or another ISP, can apparently render their customers liable to a BT charge, without there being any compulsion on them to warn their customers of the change, is there anyway we can check our line?

I suspect that there is. Surely the bundled and unbundled connections will see different routers, depending on which company is providing the connection from the exchange.

But I don't know what to expect when I traceroute to my ISP's published web server address. What sort of domain name. or IP address range, should I expect to see for the different sorts of connection?

Oh right, that's why they drop UDP packets. Internet Protocols broken by ISPs--YouTube video at 11.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damned

I'm with Tiscali, and when I leave I will have to pay £125 if I switch to a company that is not unbundled, is that it?

If BT (the sole and only provider of telephone lines and exchanges etc in this country) is on the slide, then our entire telephone network etc will be subject to fragmentation and bits sold off to Tom, Dick and Harry who will let it slide further into chaos whilst raising prices and getting huge subsidies and guaranteed golden hellos, golden goodbyes, golden reinstatements and pensions and golden handcuffs, free houses, free international business class travel - all paid for by my taxes.

Gordon Brown will ensure this will happen before he leaves office (if he leaves).

Ofcom have publicly stated that their main aim (according to that article) is to try and secure income for BT.

UK broadband is damned.

[Lloyd]

Why on earth would anyone

want to go back to BT? How much is line rental?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris Williams

Your right, but if ofcom are on BT's case and they have admitted they need to change then ofcom should be coming down harder on them instead of doing what they always do.. sitting on the fence

[JimP]

Shirley this means...

you just migrate to another unbundled provider (there's no information in this article about whether that will incur any costs). Why would you want to change to a provider who blame their own IT system for ripping people off? The only upside for me as a pipex customer is that if the service goes downhill as a result of being switched to Tiscali, it means I've just got a heads up that my local exchange has been upgraded and I'll be able to upgrade to a decent ISP with faster, more recent hardware. Duh! (Paris angle). There doesn't seem to be any other way of finding out when an exchange is being upgraded, not one which BT are allowing ISPs access to anyway.

[Tim J]

Stay with BT

The best thing to do is to keep your main line rental with BT - you can still have LLU broadband, no problem, just don't switch the rest of the line away from BT - i.e. keep paying the BT line rental.

The benefit of this is that you can still take advantage of a whole host of indirect access providers, who provide cheaper calls than BT - that can either mean dialling an access code before you make your call, or even easier you can opt for "Carrier Pre Selection" where all your calls, or at least all calls of a certain type (international, mobile etc) are automatically routed via another provider - and you can even over-ride this if you want to use BT or another provider for these calls.

Or you can go for a really fancy solution of having a customisable dialler box programmed to route your calls via the cheapest provider on a call-by-call basis.

The advantage of staying with BT is that they are obliged to let you access all these other competing services - if you start paying your line rental to someone else (e.g. TalkTalk or Tiscali) then you will forfeit this capability.

[Nick Palmer]

@MichaelG

It's worse; you'll probably have to pay to switch to any company other than Tiscali, unbundled or not - the point of unbundling is that you're now on Tiscali's kit at the exchange for broadband rather than BT's. Move to someone else and they'll have to get someone to shift the wires over whether it's to their own kit or back on to BT's, depending on whether they're unbundled or are reselling BT's Max service.

Slamming a customer onto an unbundled service without their consent should be illegal. Proponents who cite Be are using the example of a company with a decent reputation who've used unbundling to provide a better service as a cover for the vast majority of companies, like Tiscali, who are using it to cut costs by imposing onerous restrictions and degrading service.

Ofcom should be scrapped; they do nothing to safeguard the public from this sort of unscrupulous practice, and when they intervene in ANY service it is (as with recent announcements regarding the future of HD Freeview) to the detriment of the public.

[Anonymous Coward]

SMPF

If tiscalli LLU is SMPF then there should be no £125 connection charge. TalkTalk LLU is MPF hence the possible £125 reconnection charge.

[Anonymous Coward]

TANSTAFL

Broadband is a service offered by companies in exchange for, wait for it, money!

People shouldn't be surprised that there is money involved in getting two companies to work together. BT were practically forced into providing almost 100% broadband coverage in the UK, consequently they have to charge more for broadband than competitors who can pick and choose which exchanges to unbundle (they do this to reduce their outgoings to BT Wholesale, not just to reduce prices to consumers).

I don't know what the terms of Tiscali's "stealth" unbundling are but if it doesn't include a reduced price to the consumer, then OFCOM should make any charges for returning the line to its original state (i.e. BT's broadband infrastructure) payable by the unbundler. If they do give a reduction to the consumer, then its the consumer's own risk.

[Anonymous Coward]

a PROPER solution ...

""Ofcom is working with Openreach, BT Retail and other communications providers to identify the reasons for this and to identify a solution as soon as possible."

The solution SHOULD be that BT should only be able to seek the payment from the organisation that performed the unbundling, and that organisation should be prohibited from passing the cost back to the customer.

But this is Ofcom ... since when did you hear of Ofcom actually acting in the interests of the CUSTOMER ???

[Chris Williams]

Re: TANSTAFL

"BT were practically forced into providing almost 100% broadband coverage in the UK, consequently they have to charge more for broadband than competitors who can pick and choose which exchanges to unbundle"

Yes, because the national network BT profits from was built with billions of taxpayers' money.

Tiscali is not passing the unbundling savings on to ex-Pipex customers.

[Damien Jorgensen]

lol, Freeloaders

If people are stupid enough to go with the rubbish services provided by the likes of Tiscali, why would BT want them back.

If I were BT I'd make customers pay £300 to come back and decent a decent service.

My own thoughts are the kind of person to get caught out by this is the kind of person that is financed up to the hilt, in the coming years wont have a home let alone a telephone line. So who cares!

[Nick Palmer]

@TANSTAFL

How the hell can it be the "consumer's own risk" when the consumer isn't even informed that it's happening, let alone asked whether they consent to the move?

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Lloyd

"Why on earth would anyone want to go back to BT?"

I don't want to go back to them, however as there is a cease on the line in the house I am about to move into, I have no choice. I must pay BT to re-enable my line and then sign up for a minimum contract (It was 3 months last time I did it, however I think it may now be twelve) - It's a good job BT aren't a monopoly isn't it... </sigh>

A geek, because i'd love to see Bungling Twats dissolved in acid...

[Craig]

MAC code requested (Pipex Customer)

Ok I have informed Ofcom complained to on the news that Pipex is currently doing this (They just send a letter apparently to the ISP). I have now after 6 years asked for my MAC code, so goodbye Pipex it WAS good...

Luckily my exchange has not been converted, but Pipex did try to renew my contract at Xmas to include free evening calls (stealth tatics from the sales side also). But there has not been any mention of the LLU migration program, by letter or email.

This appears to be a loophole, and for most people including unaware IT people are falling for it (Myself Included). I am surprised that tiscalli have been getting away with this. Saying this looking at any Pipex forums, people are leaving in their droves..

Good site to see exchange details http://www.samknows.com/broadband/

Heart because don't we love how this country runs sometimes?

[Morely Dotes]

Suggested solution

BT should charge third-party ISPs, such as Tiscali, 125 Pounds Sterling to unbundle the line in the first place, then let the customer come back for free if he so chooses. If an engineer isn't required to "rebundle," BT gets to keep the dosh.

The sooner Tiscali goes titsup, the sooner the Internet will be free of one well-known virus farm, and the leeches that own it.

[Richard Speight]

Not a mandatory charge?

Then they should tell their fecking idiot call centre monkies. I was 'bumped off' Bulldog's network once C&W decided consumers where too much effort. Even to move to another unbundled supplier would require me to get a line with BT (why? who knows).

BT insisted they *had* to charge me the £126 reconnection fee. I asked that they 'flipped the switch' in their exchange (I assume they have computers and that for provisioning -- but what the hell would I know, I only work in Telecoms); and if that didn't work, to send an 'engineer' out to look at the physical line (and exactly what engineering qualifications do these people have anyway?)

Needless to say, I paid through gritted teeth, and passed on the costs to Bulldog (recorded delivery, itemised costings, etc, etc.)

Still, not what I'd call 'customer service'.

[Martin Saunders]

BT retail to blame

If BT Retail can't fix their systems, then either move to another LLU provider who uses full MPF (so also provides the full line inc. dial tone), or sign up to a Wholesale Line Rental provider who does new line installs and doesn't have broken systems. If you move to WLR, you'll then get access again to all the IPStream resellers, in the same way as you would if you returned to BT Retail.

There are a few solutions to this, none of which are mentioned in this article. Don't forget BT Retail are now a Wholesale Line Rental reseller in exactly the same way as all the other WLR resellers, so BT Retail should never be your only choice any more.

[Steve Browne]

BT Network

For Chris Williams, BT's network was not paid for from tax payers funds. It was paid for entirely out of profits made by the Post Office (and latterly BT). In fact, the POEU analysed the Post Office accounts several times to find it was the government that was milking the Post Office and not the other way around.

It should be illegal to do anything to a customer's line without the customer's express consent, especially when there are additional charges to be made for reconnection. The whole point of LLU was to permit customers to obtain better deals than those on offer from BT Retail. This was a direct result of BT failing to provide services, so opening up the last (3) miles to the customer's door.

I do not believe for one moment that BT cannot change the charge in their system. I have never seen a system where prices are hard coded into programs. Even if this were true, it would be a small change which could be implemented very quickly.

Ofcom are past their sell by date. They need to be reminded that they are there to regulate and to represent consumer's interests, not the interests of shareholders in listed companies.

Ofcom, amongst others (ASA, OFT) need to act to curb the activities of companies such as Tiscali.

The type of service in teh exchange is irrelavnt to rewiring required to connect a to any network available in that exchange. Whatever they insatll, it must still appear on the Main Distribution Frame, then a 2 wire jumper is required to connect it up to appropriate equipment. There may be an additional two wires, via a pass filter for ADSL. The Post Office allowed 1 hour per job (in the exchange) to do this type of work, though, in practice a single line took far less to complete.

Basically, people are being ripped off and no one wants to accept any responsibility.

[Anonymous Coward]

Orange Guilty as well

Orange "upgraded" my sisters line last spring without telling her what it meant.

So what did it mean?

It meant that it hasnt worked properly since and that she will have to pay through the nose to get out of the new contract they also failed to tell her the "upgrade" would involve.

Late breaking news; after 8 months Orange have finally tested her line and admitted there is a fault with the exchange equipment; no news on which decade they intend to fix it.

Interestingly, her neighbour and the couple opposite her are all on Orange and have all had the same problem since the spring.

By my estimate, Tiscali "Lost" 600,000 customers last in the last year - 18 months; it does not matter how many ISP's they buy, their numbers keep plunging downwards.!!

Bankruptcy looms!!!

[Mark Dempster]

A to B to A?

I was fairly happy with my Talktalk connection, but wanted to move house - just 2 miles down the road. The owners of the new house were also on Talktalk. You'd think it would be fairly simple for me to take over the new connection? No. Both I & the other guy had to 'surrender' our line to BT, then ask BT to connect me at a cost of £125. Then, if I wanted, I could switch to Talktalk or another ISP - but I'd have to pay a penalty charge for only having the line a short time....

Complete ripoff.

[Anonymous Coward]

A few words

By Chad H.

Forward the invoice for £125 to Tiscalli via recorded delivery. They caused the problem, they can pay for the solution.

Nice idea, but this is down to BT, they have admitted its a problem on their side!

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By Lloyd

want to go back to BT? How much is line rental?

Well said! why pay BT line rental when others provide it for free! (ok they are paying it in some way in the background but not passing the cost onto the customer!)

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By MichaelG

If BT (the sole and only provider of telephone lines and exchanges etc in this country) is on the slide

I dont think BT are gonna go to the wall unfortuntly

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By Tim J.

The best thing to do is to keep your main line rental with BT - you can still have LLU broadband, no problem, just don't switch the rest of the line away from BT - i.e. keep paying the BT line rental.

Why? BT are one of the biggest money grabbers their is for a very poor substandard over priced service!

The dont meet appointments! and they dont for warn you so your lefting waiting! when you get one your charged the earth for the issue still not be fixed.. i work with BT on a daily basis and im shocked at the things i come across every day!

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By JimP

There doesn't seem to be any other way of finding out when an exchange is being upgraded, not one which BT are allowing ISPs access to anyway.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ use this my friend, use the the wholesale checker. click BT ADSL, then click on the link for your exchange, gives you a list of what providers have enabled the exchange. and also a form at the bottem to add your email address for updates on this exchange.. just what you need!

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By Nick Palmer

Tiscali, who are using it to cut costs by imposing onerous restrictions and degrading service.

Yes maybe so.. but most cheap/free providers are only providing what the public want. most customers using these services are more than happy.. the ones that are not are the ones that require a far better service see the cheap price sign up but dont do any research!

Ofcom should be scrapped; they do nothing to safeguard the public from this sort of unscrupulous practice,

Could not agree more!

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By Damien Jorgensen

My own thoughts are the kind of person to get caught out by this is the kind of person that is financed up to the hilt, in the coming years wont have a home let alone a telephone line. So who cares!

Your all heart! your making judgments that not only can you not prove but are so far away from reality its almost laughable! to be honet i hope your the one left without a home!

[Rick Easton]

MAC code requested (Another Pipex Customer)

I too have requested my MAC code from Pipex, having found out that I've been LLU'd without giving consent. To be honest, I haven't (yet) had any problems with speed or connectivity, but given the forum reports to the contrary I would have been expecting trouble soon.

What is particularly incredible is that I can't simply email them a MAC request, I have to send them snail mail or phone them (on their 0871-long-queue-staffed-by-morons-passing-for-customer-service number)

I reckon I'll move to IDnet who (at least currently) aren't charging anything to receive LLU subscribers (hooray for IDnet!!!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on a cotton picking moment

The article says the charge is levied by BT Openreach. This is wrong, at least wrt the £100+ charge. When a customer wants to move from LLU back to a BT Retail or BTWholesale service (voice or broadband), there are wires which need to be moved in the exchange. BT Openreach levy a charge to BT Retail for this work, in the same way as the levy *the very same charge* to any LLU provider. From memory, the Openreach charge is around £30-40 (correction welcome).

Quite how BT Retail manage to inflate this £30 to £100+ is anybody's guess, especially given that "flow through provisioning" of broadband (where nobody had to touch a broadband order by hand anywhere between placing order on ISP website and Openreach bod moving wires in exchange) was one of the bigger (albeit quieter) successes of BT's broadband rollout.

Put another way: the bad boy in this picture is BT Retail, not BT Openreach, and (unusually) not BT Wholesale.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Richard Speight

For someone who works in the telecom industry you dont seem to know much.

its not as simple as flipping a switch, when you go on to MPF LLU you are directly connected to the CP's equipment. The only way to go back to BT is for a frames engineer in the exchange to rejumper your circuit back on the the BT kit something that can take more than 20 mins depending on how archaic the mapping and routing details are. Hence the bill raised by Openreach for the engineers work that was carried out.

Re: Hold on a cotton picking moment

Now I know openreach levy a £40 charge to the CP for tie pair changes but no idea what they levy for new provisions.

[Anonymous Coward]

BT robbing bastards

Got rid of them a while ago. Solutions are virgin (utterly useless salespeople, horrendous service if what we hear is true) or mobile with 'unlimited' data or usb modem from a mobile co. Costs for N95 with t-mobile, 3GB slap wrists but not charged compares well with BT line rental plus extras plus didn't we tell you that plus we've changed the contract plus VAT. Granted the actual data rate can be zero and all sorts of things don't quite work, service pretty crappy etc etc; but it isn't bloody BT.

This message comes to you via the wonders of wireless data.

[darren]

get yer facts right

I'm surprised at some of the comments on here given the pubs are closed...

BT is a private company, that has built a broadband network from a mixture of it's own funds, and some RDA funding for remote areas. Why should BT not charge for provision of any service a customer wants, be it a BT service or any other service provider? Why should BT do anything to help customers move to a foreign owned service provide or any other service provider? While they should not stand in the way of customers wishing to do it, there shouldn't be any subsidisation. So Tiscali has built it's entire broadband business plan on BT offering cheaper LLU prices (as did CPW) - more fool them and with direction like that they deserve to fail.

Yes there needs to be some clarification in the industry, but it needs to come from the industry and not fall on the shoulders of a private company all the time.

BT is not 'on the slide', but like anything British, we'll always have a bloody good go at it, try our best to knock it into submision, then all have a good cry about it when it's gone. Lets not forget that as well as doing a pretty good job of looking after much of the UK's national infrastructure, it's also one of the UK's largest employers, and supports hundreds of other UK and global companies that keep Brits in employment.

And no, I don't work for them. Not me. Nope. No sireee.

[steogede]

Don't you just love it

We finally start getting LLU - which is supposed to increase competition, yet the only people who can go into the exchange an move around a few wires are BT OpenReach technicians who charge the earth.

-- Correction, I just read @Richard Speight by AP:

>> ... something that can take more than 20 mins ... openreach levy a £40 charge

>> to the CP

More than 20 minutes? lets call it 30. So what your saying is that BT OpenReach only charge £80 (or more) per hour, it is BT Retail who charge the £170 (or more) per hour on top of that.

All we seemed to have gained from getting 'competition' is ability to be extorted by two BT monopoly companies - and to be extorted twice the amount for less than half the work, on the second occasion.

[Chris]

Blame the IT System....

...or could it just be the users?

My recent experience with B(loody) T(hieves) would suggest that the USERS of the 'system' are as much to blame as 'the system'.

All I did was attempted to move a NUMBER, and the associated Zen broadband recently from one fully functional hardware enabled physical address to another on the same exchange.

Result?

Numerous broken promises, appointments and outright lies.

Ten days without any working phone line.

A week with the wrong number activated on the line.

Ten days without broadband.

Nearly three weeks of complete chaos and disruption.

Oh, and a charge of £116.30 AFTER being assured by customer services that all charges arising from this mess would be waived in compensation. Which I've paid, because frankly I'm scared to contact BT because every time I have done so in this saga things have gone from bad to worse,

And all along, every time you talk to BT staff, the excuse is 'the system'...

British (WHY are they allowed to insult this country by using its name in their business title?) Telecom management are expert at making facile excuses.

Like virtually every company where you encounter incompetence, duplicity and untruthfulness in the public facing staff, the rot starts at the top and trickles down.

BT broken up and the unravelling of the future of broadband in the UK? Maybe, but just how much worse can it get WITHOUT BT? Compared to, say, how much worse it's going to get WITH them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add fuel to the fire

Most of the Opereach Frames techs get paid sub 20K a year.... Which is less than £60 a day after tax....

[b]

Mafioso!

british telelcom are one big mafia organisation.

they need to be broken into and broken up.

they were supposed to be unbundling BEFORE 2000 and here we are in 2008 with them STILL having managed to fob everyone off and protect their revenue streams. to see ofcom realising BT's "concerns" over it's revenue stream and profits (a PRIVATE company) is particularly galling.

for YEARS BT have used the pathetic excuse that some of the old victorian exhcanges were a bit dangerous and THAT'S they they couldn't unbundle.

BAH!

british telecom are holding this country back. they are the CLASSIC example of a monopoly that needs to be broken up.

we are paying to much for our broadband and FAR TOO MUCH TIME is spent on this unbundling fiasco, for the last 8 years or so.

opcom is USELESS. the labour government is USELESS on this.

we need action, we need PROPER competition in the BB space.

</rant>

[Peter Mc Aulay]

Hmm

So if I move from ISP X to ISP Y I might get a 125 quid bill from BT? What's preventing me from binning the bill, given that I have no contract with BT nor did I sollicit any sort of service from them? Oh, ISP Y may not connect me? Well, cable it is, then.

[Nick Palmer]

Well, my letter to Nildram just went,..

"Dear Sir/Madam,

We received your letter dated 29th January advising us that unbundling to LLU would occur at the start of February. Quite how two days (assuming next day delivery) qualifies as "advance notice" I'm unsure.

We have not been asked whether we wish to be migrated to LLU, and given that should we wish to move suppliers after LLU we would be potentially subject to a £125 reconnection charge, an onerous condition which largely negates the benefit of paying more for a contract with a 30 day notice period, we should have been.

We are aware that following the Tiscali buyout the migration will actually be to Tiscali's LLU network, and are further aware that there are significant issues with this network involving traffic blocking or throttling, connection instability and connection speed.

We do not wish our connections to be unbundled, especially since we have some which are actually on fixed 2Mbit IPStream due to connection stability issues.

Consequently, we would like to know how we may confirm that our connections will NOT be unbundled, or if unbundling is unavoidable, we would like specific confirmation of this so that we may request MAC codes for our connections and move them to an alternate supplier.

Yours sincerely,

<me>"

[Markie Dussard]

"Opinions are like assholes. Everbody's got one."

"Flip a switch?" "Move a couple of wires?" What a bunch of numpties.

How many of you have actually seen the MDF in your local exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

MDF

Me as well as the TAM, LLUT old style mdf and the new krone MDF etc etc etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't move the wires

""Flip a switch?" "Move a couple of wires?"

Neither is really appropriate for today's needs.

There's an obvious answer -- a ROUTER, whose settings are controlled by THE USER not BT and not the third party ISPs.

If I want to change my ISP, I should be able to log on a web site at my local BT exchange, enter a password known only to me, and immediately have my data routed to the new ISP I have chosen.

Neither BT nor the outgoing ISP should be able to levy a charge for doing so, nor should they have any say in the matter. Nor should there be any minimum term contract that penalises me for doing so.

If my ISP goes down, or gives me bad service, then I have an instant remedy -- use a different one -- and the defective ISP has to immediately stop billing me for the service, billing exactly pro-rata to the nearest minute for the part of the month you've actually used, using a published uniform monthly tarriff that's the same for everybody who switches to them.

Sounds like a much more PRACTICAL way of doing things -- though none of the ISPs will like it, because it will penalise the bad service that makes a profit for most of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spellchecking is not proofreading.

Gah, you done it again.

"What they don't tell you if to a fully unbundled service is that it you could end up being stung with a £125 charge."

"If to"? How can you read that sentence and not have that jump out at you as obviously garbled? Sure, both of those words are spelled correctly, but they don't make any damn sense. You meant "IS THAT", not "IF TO".

Seriously, your quality control has plummeted over the past couple of months. I'm noticing loads of these kind of errors, and I don't think it's because I've suddenly become more sensitive, I think it's because you've started making a lot more mistakes. Have your PHBs outsourced the whole operation to a tribe of illiterate Elbonian pig-herders or something?

[daniel]

@Don't move the wires

Amen to that... as long as they are not all equally useless...

Turn every exchange into a microIX... but who pays for the connection from you to the exchange? and who will maintain it?

And who will have the guts to ramrod that through as law, as I cannot see any ISP or ofcom the toothless doing anything to help the customer get any form of useful service from a provider.

Flame as most ISP's and telcos should be burnt at the stake...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, who precisely

"And who will have the guts to ramrod that through as law"

It should be Ofcom. But as you so rightly say, OFCOM the Toothless.

If there was anybody in Ofcom with the slightest brains, they would have come up with precisely that idea, long ago.

Who pays for maintenance isn't an issue. Whether that last bit is bundled or unbundled, its still as I understand it BT that actually runs the wires through the streets. So the termination at the exchange, including the router that switches it to the other ISPs, is naturally BT's job to pay for, install and maintain.

Its a penalty for being a de-facto monopoly provider in a supposedly non-monopoly business.

[Chad H.]

@ a few words

It may be a BT charge, but its due to action by orange. Therefore orange can pay BT.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ dont move the wires

Great Idea, but erm who is going to pay for the whole exchange to be redesigned? Who is going to pay for th eumpteen of contractors to carry out the redsign? Who is going to be pay for the umpteen engineers it will take to migrate 30,000 - 40,000 pairs of copper cable in your average towns exchange on to your new spangled router idea? Not including the chaos of decades old mapping and routing and exchages with asbestos.

Will you be happy to outlay the etra costs for all the above to happen?

Am starting to sound like a BT worshipper but I am far from it in fact I often have a I hate BT rant every few hours at work but working in the telco industry I just realise how much of an impractical idea it is...

[Danny Traynor]

Re:Spellchecking is not proofreading.

"What they don't tell you if to a fully unbundled service is that it you could end up being stung with a £125 charge."

"If to"? How can you read that sentence and not have that jump out at you as obviously garbled? Sure, both of those words are spelled correctly, but they don't make any damn sense. You meant "IS THAT", not "IF TO".

Yes, because,

"What they don't tell you is that a fully unbundled service is that it you could end up being stung with a £125 charge."

make perfect sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who is going to be pay for the umpteen engineers"

It should be part of what BT is able to charge the ISP who contracts the first unbundling,

No pay, no unbundle. The customers won't complain they haven't been unbundled.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It should be part of what BT is able to charge"

I dont think you read what I was responding to but if you had then:

Right so the ISP should be charged to pay for the engineers to change the customer to the "all in one router" idea so that customer can then leave them and join any provider at a whim?

[Anonymous Coward]

ha you should look at NZ

I'm emigrating to NZ and dreading the broadband situation. There is no LLu out there and you have to pay through the nose £15 a month for 1Gb total upload and download !! For 80gb it is £75 every month