AW: unbundling of phone services

[Andreas Kostyrka]

Well unbundling of the "last mile" certainly helps getting a competition going in DSL lines.

OTOH, it's still unclear what produces a competitive mobile market. Comparing Austria with Germany, Austria traditionally had better deals than Germany, despite lacking virtual operators for a long time. The differences are that stricking, that I've used my Austrian SIM card for over a year in roaming till I found a calling plan that makes at least so sense for me.

OTOH, not everything is clear cut, e.g. Austrian operators still do not have a 100% real UMTS flat rate, while such data plans are available in Germany for some years now.

Hard to understand what drives competition in mobile markets :(

Andreas  
-- Ursprüngl. Mitteil. --
Betreff:	unbundling of phone services
Von:	"Robin Paulson" <robin.paulson at gmail.com>
Datum:		12.06.2007 21:27

sorry for the partly off-topic, slightly rambling post, but i feel
this has partial relevance to openmoko

one of the hot topics where i live (NZ), is LLU, unbundling of
monopoly-controlled internet connections to the home/business, to
allow any other companies to have access to the network at a fair
price. this is seen by many as the holy grail of open internet access,
spurring innovation and driving down prices. a number of countries
where one company/entity has monopoly control of the lines have taken,
or are about to take, this route.

there has been lots of talk around the iphone/openmoko about what
could potentially be done in the way of innovative use of mobile phone
networks, but as the networks are locked down and controlled by their
operators, there is very little considering how old/how pervasive the
technologies are.

so my question is:
is there a similar movement anywhere for the equivalent of LLU for
mobile phone networks? i.e. allowing other operators to use networks
of vodafone/state-owned telco/sprint/whoever at reasonable price? most
countries don't have monopolies providing mobile services (even nz has
2 providers), but they still act as though they are monoplies,
providing (in my experience) vastly overpriced, very limited services

at the moment, the innovative things that could potentially be done
are restricted to using wi-fi connections, but wi-fi is not anywhere
near as pervasive as gsm/cdma coverage

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