No - it was flawed because the GPO was the only show in town.
maybe Edison had something to do with how the stuff got sold and how it was wired at the exchange , but the problem was they charged you 200 quid and there was nobody else who was allowed to do it for less.
So, when they opened up the market, these other guys came along, looked at the mess Edison had caused and said 'never mind , guv, we will do it for £150, and we will get the van round next week".
There followed a price war as some other dudes started up in business and they would do it for a flat £100 and gt it fixed in less than 3 days.
BT, in trying to keep up with Virgin Media , their main rivals , is now willing to fit the phone on the same day and do it for free - the money comes out of the calls charged to your number these days.
like I said, In Russia, the State ran ~everything~ as a monopoly; in Britain the government ran the phones. The similarity is that they were both monopolies and artificially created monopolies are not in the public interest.
unless you can put up a creditable cite that says different, you just lost the argument, buddy. Go look at this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4061613.stm
A former prime minister, Harold Macmillan, famously grumbled about "selling the family silver", and had the Labour Party been elected in 1987, they would have reversed the process.
Yet the privatised telecom industry seemed to deliver; prices came down, waiting lists for telephone vanished in the early 1980s and never reappeared, most faults were cleared quickly, and even public telephones began to work, once the industry regulator cracked his whip.
From the cited source.
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Date: 6/7/11 20:54 (UTC)maybe Edison had something to do with how the stuff got sold and how it was wired at the exchange , but the problem was they charged you 200 quid and there was nobody else who was allowed to do it for less.
So, when they opened up the market, these other guys came along, looked at the mess Edison had caused and said 'never mind , guv, we will do it for £150, and we will get the van round next week".
There followed a price war as some other dudes started up in business and they would do it for a flat £100 and gt it fixed in less than 3 days.
BT, in trying to keep up with Virgin Media , their main rivals , is now willing to fit the phone on the same day and do it for free - the money comes out of the calls charged to your number these days.
like I said, In Russia, the State ran ~everything~ as a monopoly; in Britain the government ran the phones. The similarity is that they were both monopolies and artificially created monopolies are not in the public interest.
unless you can put up a creditable cite that says different, you just lost the argument, buddy.
Go look at this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4061613.stm
A former prime minister, Harold Macmillan, famously grumbled about "selling the family silver", and had the Labour Party been elected in 1987, they would have reversed the process.
Yet the privatised telecom industry seemed to deliver; prices came down, waiting lists for telephone vanished in the early 1980s and never reappeared, most faults were cleared quickly, and even public telephones began to work, once the industry regulator cracked his whip.
From the cited source.