All the big UK telecom/broadband providers seem to increase their prices every April, by _more_ than the rate of inflation, as part of their contract.
Can anybody explain how/why they can justify this? Surely digital communications technology is one area where costs are still falling consistently.
Is this because people's bandwidth demands are increasing faster, or what?
(I assume that the actual answer is: "Because they can"! ☹️)
@tpuddle I'm not sure that this is an area where costs are falling consistently - energy costs (e.g. for data centres) have gone up a lot, as have labour costs. Openreach wholesale prices have been hiked this month and 5G + fibre investment is ongoing.
@pwaring @tpuddle Have these costs really gone up at CPI *PLUS* 3.9% for the last 10 years.
The same telcos that tell Ofcom that they need dodgy practices like this be able to afford network investment, also tell DCMS (or whatever it is now) that they need public subsidy to build out their network, and campaign for taxes on content providers to provide a cross subsidy. Network investment ransomware does a lot of political heavy lifting for big telco.
I was thinking about this last night. The _big_ thing telcos could do that would _drastically_ change their future is ....
IPV6
If they handed out static routable IPV6 ranges to all customers, within a couple of years the cloud boom would be over. Folks would buy calendar, email, photo appliances, plug them in and have them just _work_ with no ads or tracking needed.
But they won't, because they can't see how to bill for it.
