[techtalk] RE: [grrltalk] webads

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 12:57:21PM +0200 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Nils Philippsen thought:
> On Sun, 15 Apr 2001, Lothan wrote:
> 
> > On a complete different tangent, I never did understand how folks in the UK
> > could tolerate metered service for local calls. It just seems so...
> > uncivilized. Of course, I was born and bred in the USA so I come from a
> > completely different background and point of view.
> 
> (It's similar in Germany:) It's not that you have much of a choice when
> you're more or less forced to use what the monopoly gives to you. For
> instance the German Telekom (former state monopoly gone public) owns the
> last mile to the customer (and many of the smaller telcos have to lease
> their lines even for long distances). They charge the other telcos a) a
> fixed rate because they provide the wire and b) by the minute/second if
> they use those lines (e.g. even if I switched to another telco completely,
> Telekom would get it's share metered). Not much of an incentive for the
> other telcos to give me unmetered access or a flat rate, is it? A while
> ago they were obliged to open up the flat rate they gave to their own
> online service T-Online to other telcos as well -- instead of doing this
> they just ditched all modem/ISDN flat rates completely (and told their
> customers how much better it is to pay many times over the flat rate).

And I thought mainland Europeans had it nice already.  Here in Ireland,
the "local loop unbundling" as it's called is busily failing to happen.
The (formerly state-run) telecoms monopoly "eircom" has been on the brink
of rolling out ASDL for about the last three years and is still delaying.
Their main fear is that it will impinge greatly on their corporate "leased
line" business (I've no idea how much my company pays for a 128K internet
24/7 connection but it's big).  That and the fact that, once they roll out
the service, they'll have to give the other telcos access to the "last
mile".  A number of telcos offered flat rate (one off-peak for ~25 euros
per month another 24/7 @56k for ~25 euros per month) but the first, which 
has to rent from eircom has closed this service to new accounts while the
second, which has its own (cable tv) network was rolling out a fibre
network to supply this but has halted the rollout until the risk of tv and
telecoms service from eircom is resolved (if the current monopoly is
allowed to supply the same products that this telco provides, they'll find
it very hard to attract customers away, though I think there's enough
people pissed off with eircom that they'll move to another telco just to
give eircom a kick in the ass.  

OTOH, this same eircom perpetrated the biggest government sponsered con in 
recent times.  The company went public some time back with a huge public 
campaign to get the general public to buy shares.  One of the main ideas 
behind this was to get shares spread out over as much of the population as 
possible so they'd have an interest in the well-being of eircom.  

The fraud went something like this.

1. Insider dealing:  Now, you can't actually have insider dealing until
   there exist shares to deal but this is essentially what happened.  The
   eircom directors were well aware (as the public weren't) of the
   imminent requirement for local loop unbundling and knew that this would
   be their last chance to go public.

2. Lack of accounts:  Before the flotation, Eircom had never published 
   audited accounts.  If they had, it would have been quite evident that
   the company had never turned a profit and that is was being supported
   by government subvention even after it had been privatised.

3. Immoral advertising:  "Hurry! Hurry! get your telco shares!  Make a
   killing on the stock market!".  The advertising to "register" for
   shares was accompanied by media interviews where it was suggested that
   these shares would rise nicely on the stock market and a killing would
   be made by all.  The acquisition of shares was pitched as an
   "investment" in a market where *ordinary* people are used to investing in
   protected or "bonded" investment funds where your investment capital is
   somehow protected.  People, who were unaware of the volatility of the
   stock market, were led to believe (without it being explicitely said)
   that their money would be "safe".

4. Blind purchase:  To purchase eircom shares, you were required to
   "register", pay over your cheque in advance and, at flotation, you were
   told how much the shares were to be sold for.  At that point, you were
   already comitted and so didn't have the opportunity to reject the
   purchase of overpriced shares.  Further, the ordinary shareholders
   didn't receive their documantation for a number of days and so were not
   in a position to react to the market immediatly.  I'm not sure just
   when the shares crashed but AFAIR, the slide had already begun within a
   few days and so the ordinary shareholders would have been trapped by
   the time they were in a position to sell.  (This "blind purchase"
   method has been used in the past for public flotations but, in general,
   there have been "free" shares also which would cushion first day losses
   and allow some "bailout" time before a shareholder would suffer a
   financial loss.)

The shares crashed, they now stand at about 66% of their issue price.  The
director of eircom publically admitted (after the event naturally) that
the shares had "perhaps been priced a little high"!  The company is now
cushioned by thousands of *trapped* customers who own negative equity
shares and who will be afraid to move to another telco in case their
shares drop even further and are now reinforcing eircom's near monopoly in
the country.
 
> The only way to get a flat rate is either to switch to one of the other
> telcos which still offers it (if you want ISDN flat) or to wait on the
> Telekom to supply your area with DSL service which might take until
> Q1/2002 here (the prospect has been Q2/2002, Q3/2001, Q2/2001 and now
> finally Q1/2002 -- I wonder how often this will change in the future). Not
> to say that you have to wait that long to get DSL with another provider as
> well (beacuse the Telekom provides the lines).
 
There is now *no* possibility of a flat rate in Ireland.  I'm not greedy,
all I want is flat-rate 56K access.  I would have had it too only NTL
stopped the rollout before they got to my house!  AARRGGHHHH!!!

> Some 3 or 4 years ago I read about a US TV/phone/cable provider where you
> could get TV, phone and cable modem access (4Mbit/s and 1 static IP, not
> the lousy ADSL 768/128kbit with dynamic IPs you get over here (or not))
> for 60 or 70 USD a month. Let's talk about envy ;-/.

This rollout started here also with NTL for about 90 euro per month but
stalled because of the uncertainty about eircom's position in the market.


-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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