this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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UK Economy
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Yeah, that is similar to how the landline telephone network runs - OpenReach owns and maintains the network and has to provide access to everyone else.
A single high quality mobile network would make sense, and reduce duplication. But the Government went the monopolies route of selling frequencies to telecoms providers to build out their own networks to encourage competition. It works to a point but is wasteful.
To be honest, if it were nationalised, I would be seriously concerned over the government's initiative to invest properly in it, just like with everything else that they don't invest in.
But who said that it had to be publicly owned.
Yeah I understand that concern. It's difficult though - public utilities like Water have languished in private ownership; treated like expensive assets to hold, use to acquire cheap debt - but there is 0 competition in water provision so privatising it never made much sense.
Openreach is arguably less like the Water companies; the competition is actually the layer down with the consumer facing companies that are either paying for Openreach services which drives the investment or building competing networks (often via access given to them to Openreaches infrastructure by regulation). Who owns Openreach is arguably less important?
I'm personally of the opinion that basic services like Railways, Healthcare, and Water should be in public hands. The profit motive just doesn't work in those. But it seems to be working in Telecommunications, probably because there is sense in paying "more" for "premium" services. People will pay more for faster connections that they want or businesses need, which drives investment. You can't really pay for "better" water, and "better" healthcare isn't generally a thing (as in we should and can be providing the best healthcare options to anyone with proper investment in the NHS; premium in healthcare is jumping the queues but that is a manufactured demand due to poor investment in the service which can't keep up with demand. The staff in the private sector are actually the same as in the NHS, and private healthcare will never provide the complex and acute stuff without extreme cost; they just cherry pick the easy stuff)