BT announced price hikes for residential customers:
Here's the story .

Meanwhile Telecom New Zealand are trying the same trick:
The other story

Only thing is, we don't have a choice of Telco providers here, it's either like it or... well you decide.
Legalised robbery IMO.

A lot of people in the U.K. have no choice either, unless they want to abandon landline service and just use cellular.

Outside of the major urban areas there are vast areas rural and smaller-town Britain in which BT is the only landline option. You can get alternate long-distance service, but you're still tied to BT for the rental on your POTS line.

Eircom in Ireland have a similar approach. Keep jacking up the line rental, regardless of which operator you choose, you still pay eircom line rental if it's supplied over an eircom line. Even if the line rental's charged via that new operator.

We're starting to see some serious competition though as new wireless options are emerging, many of which also carry voice and totally bypass the eircom last mile network.

Meanwhile, unbundling has been held-up for years by eircom pricing structures making the whole process very uneconomic and various "technical problems" which have been used as excuses to make it difficult to implement quickly. (i.e. foot dragging)



[This message has been edited by djk (edited 01-12-2006).]

I just received by latest BT bill for this quarter today. £35 plus tax for line rental and services, plus another couple of pounds for calls I had to make to a "special" 087x number some weeks ago.

By comparison, my separate bill from my LD carrier (which includes all normal local calls as well) currently runs around £5 per month on average.

The calls are actually cheap: I pay only 3 pence per call untimed to any landline within the U.K. and 3 pence connection plus a penny a minute to call the U.S.