Ireland most costly nation for telephone line rental

bealtine

http://www.examiner.ie/irishexaminer/pages/story.aspx-qqqg=ireland-qqqm=ireland-qqqa=ireland-qqqid=86816-qqqx=1.asp


A spokesman for ComReg, the telecommunications regulator, said line rental is only one part of telephone costs.

He said he would dispute the figures and believed Ireland was not the most expensive country in the world for line rental. “The costs of telephone calls have been falling for the last 10 years,” he said.

He also said 42% of Ireland’s population live in rural areas while the EU average is 15%. “It costs more to run services into rural locations,” he said.

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Comreg are really scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for excuses here...
Even in light of numerous reports they still insist we are "not the most expensive".
How many more reports are required, how much more evidence is needed?
First the EU and now the ITU and yet they are still trying to defend the indefensible?

It is not the job of the regulator to make feeble excuses in the hope that the issue will "go away".
The job of the regulator is not to defend those they are supposed to be regulating, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, their job is to DEFEND the consumers and as a side function to ensure competition in the market place is effective. On both counts it is obvious they have failed.

After pathetic statements like the ones issued by Comreg, it is clear that they should be abolished.

Could it be that if the Line Rental is reduced to normal levels they (Comreg) won't get quite as much income to fund their activities?
Could it be that they(Comreg) are no longer interested in consumers and have become a classic case of Regulatory Capture?

Some definitions for Regulation from The Economist:

Regulation

Rules governing the activities of private-sector enterprises. Regulation is often imposed by GOVERNMENT, either directly or through an appointed regulator. However, some industries and professions impose rules on their members through self-regulation.

Regulation is often introduced to tackle MARKET FAILURE. EXTERNALITIES such as pollution have inspired rules limiting factory emissions. Regulations on the selling of financial products to individuals have been introduced as protection against unscrupulous financial FIRMS with better INFORMATION than their customers. RATE OF RETURN REGULATION and PRICE REGULATION have been used to combat NATURAL MONOPOLY, sometimes instead of NATIONALISATION. Some regulation has been motivated by politics rather than ECONOMICS, for instance, restrictions on the number of hours people can work or the circumstances in which an employer can dismiss employees.

Even when introduced for sound economic reasons, regulation can generate more costs than benefits. Regulated firms or individuals may face substantial compliance costs. Firms may devote substantial resources to REGULATORY ARBITRAGE, which would leave consumers no better off. Regulation may lead to MORAL HAZARD if people believe that the government is keeping an eye on the behaviour of the regulated business and so do less monitoring of their own. Regulation may be badly designed and thus lock an industry into an inefficient EQUILIBRIUM. Rigid regulation may hold back INNOVATION. There is also the danger of REGULATORY CAPTURE. In short, then, REGULATORY FAILURE may be even worse for an economy than market failure.
Regulatory arbitrage

Exploiting loopholes in REGULATION, and perhaps making the regulation useless in the process. This is often done by international investors that use DERIVATIVES to find ways around a country’s financial regulations.
Regulatory capture

Gamekeeper turns poacher or, at least, helps poacher. The theory of regulatory capture was set out by Richard Posner, an economist and lawyer at the University of Chicago, who argued that “REGULATION is not about the public interest at all, but is a process, by which interest groups seek to promote their private interest ... Over time, regulatory agencies come to be dominated by the industries regulated.” Most economists are less extreme, arguing that regulation often does good but is always at RISK of being captured by the regulated firms.
Regulatory failure

When REGULATION generates more economic costs than benefits.
Regulatory risk

A RISK faced by private-sector FIRMS that regulatory changes will hurt their business. In competitive markets, regulatory risk is usually small. But in NATURAL MONOPOLY industries, such as electricity distribution, it may be huge. To ensure that regulatory risk does not deter private firms from offering their services, a GOVERNMENT wishing to change its regulations may have good reason to compensate private firms that suffer losses as a result of the change.

Patrickof

While I agree totally with the above, I must say that in some instances Comreg are hampered by the telcos.

I remember years ago being at a technical meeting in the ODTR (as comreg were then called) to discuss the practical and technical issues in local loop unbundling (e.g. physical equipment requirements of LLU, security issues etc.)

All telcos sent their techies, but esat sent their lawyers who did everything they could to hamper the meeting, leading to it being abandoned.

Not sure what their motive was at the time.

BostonB

Its expensive when you consider they can't quarantee a phone line for data, of find the fault and fix it.