On Jan 3, 10:25*pm, Charles Ellson wrote:

Much of that is down to changes in the technology; e.g. international
telephone calls are not cheaper due to a change in ownership.

Actually, international telephone calls are a prime example of
something that really _is_ cheaper when state monopoly telecos are
broken up or otherwise lose their monopoly. In many casees, state
owned telcos take assorted measures to discourage or prohibit VoIP
international calls, because they regard international dialling as
either a luxury or a distress purchase, and therefore one they can use
to cross-subsidise into domestic services. Part of that obviously
relates to surveillance: the sort of countries that still have
nationalised monopoly telcos tend to have a pretty relaxed view on
privacy. But it's not as simple as that, and monopoly telcos squeal
that loss of their international business will impact on their their
domestic business, which clearly implies that there's a disparity in
margin.

The GPO/POT accounts are too opaque to figure out if this was
happening prior to privatisation in the UK, but elderly telecoms
policy people of my (and, I suspect, Roland's) acquaintance reckon it
was definitely the case that the nationalised telco over-recovered
costs on international calls and under-recovered them from domestic,
which was why they howled so loudly when the indirect international
carriers arrived.

ian