@Grease Monkey
"The way the market seems to work is that BT hold back from offering very high speed upgrades where there is no competition. As soon as somebody else, Virgin for example, offers or even threatens to offer fast fibre services in any given area that area suddenly jumps up BT's roll out plan."
It's a little more complicated than that, but I can see why it looks that way you describe it.
The telcos use much the same rating mechanisms to determine where to roll stuff out and that work's often done by outside agencies. At its heart is some maths - density of housing multiplied by propensity of those households to spend money on broadband. If the score is high enough, the investment happens - and that's as true for Virgin and BT as it is for the smaller operators.
They have to do this because network rollout costs about £2K per property as a national average and if the houses are too far apart or the people who live there can only afford basic broadband they lose money. Lose enough money and they go bust.
Your 5 year exclusivity idea is interesting, but if it comes with the caveat that Joe Bloggs Telco has to let anyone else use it to offer service, Joe Bloggs loses interest. That's because he can only make a return if he sells the whole service, not just renting the last mile. Building infrastructure for competitors to use is crazy - Joe Bloggs has to beg money from investors, take all the risk, then Delboy ISP comes along, no risk, and uses the kit he's installed to make money for himself. It's better for Joe Bloggs to wait for someone else to install kit and then copy Delboy - much lower risk and much quicker returns. Building and owning network is high risk and low return - not what the banks like to see.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
