It also means in the more competitive areas, BT can CUT prices to compete better with sky/tiscali et alia.

Ofcom on the whole forced BT to keep its prices artificially high in order to stimulate competition. With deregulation, that should lead to lower prices in densely populated areas. Where there is no competition (in rural exchanges), then there will still be regulation, so BT can't exploit its monopoly position.

Seems sensible enough.

BT: £££££££££££££££££££

BT's poor wholesale division, they've only had to install 4m odd LLU lines from competitors and take revenue from each line for rental/installs/moves/ceases. oh dear, they must be struggling....

Funny how they've been cutting the per customer element of IPStream wholesale prices in it's biggest 1000+ exchanges for more than 2 years now. It's approx £2-3 cheaper to have an IPStream line in London compared to most rural areas anyway. so I don't know what this ruling really does and I'm not sure you'll see BT suddenly start dropping the prices of it's favourite cash cow anymore than it has already.

Maybe the EU/ofcom could get off their arses and do something pro-active like make BT install fibre with all those millions it makes each year....

Let's take for example my current ADSL line, Phone call audio is very quiet, the NTE5 is about 15 years old, as is the drop cable, there are no extensions connected, only a Linksys WAG200G router, I am running at 59dB downstream attenuation which shows I should be capable of getting 2.2mbit on IPstream or 2.4mbit ADSL2+, fair enough, I did get 2mbit for 2 weeks, then it dropped to 608kbit sync speed, with no change to the attenuation, changing router, microfilter, phone cord, no change, my ISP looked into it and determined that there may be a fault on the line, but as the line is provided by BT I should take it up with them. I took it up with BT who say that the line meets minimum spec and isn't faulty, If I want an engineer, no problem - 120 for them to turn up on the doorstep.

I know of people who use BT as an ISP and BT will bend over backwards to help, yet the moment BT aren't the sole provider on the line they don't want to know.

BT hold onto their monopoly through being uncooperative to people who choose alternative ISPs, making it difficult to obtain levels of service that should be expected (when the person you are shouting down the phone to simply so they can hear you, tells you that you are VERY quiet, but that there is no fault on the line, you get to believe that they may, in fact, be incorrect)

BT hold a monopoly by simply making it impossible to get problems resolved simply by passing the buck to the ISP, who promptly tell you it's BT's problem.

Ofcom should implement a ruling that fault resolution should be managed properly by the line provider (usually BT) and specify a minimum level of service as a percentage of the 'up to' line speed.

Yeah, fancy BT not sending out engineers for free to help improve another ISP's connection speed.

Tut tut.