Fucking, fucking, fucking bastards.
Where to begin?
British Telecom are unquestionably one of the most irresponsible, greedy and inefficient companies in the UK. Their entire corporate strategy (if that's the right word) since their botched privatisation has been designed purely to exploit their monopoly position in the telecoms market, lining the pockets of their board and pleasing their shareholders while doing everything to prevent their domestic and business customers (i.e. almost everybody) from having the benefit of a fairly priced and competently run voice and data service. They have the gall to claim that they are forward-thinking, and yet they have easily done more to stifle technological progress in the UK and Europe at large than any other company. Here are just a few of the reasons that every single person in the UK hates them and would love to see them bear the brunt of effective industry regulation.
Due to British Telecom having an effective monopoly on telecommunications traffic in the UK (due to their ownership of most of the infrastructure), most of their tactics have involved exploiting this in the ways that they can then claim would be too expensive and complex to rectify. A case in point is the metering of phone calls. Every voice and data landline call is metered, with the rate dependent on the time of day and the distance. Oh, and every call, regardless of any other factor, will cost a minimum of 5p. Only very, very recently have BT offered other schemes of payment, and then these were initially only offered under terms and conditions extreme enough to make the 'offer' almost pointless. It costs them more to meter calls (and therefore send out itemised phone bills the size and density of housebricks) than it would to run the entire phone network unmetered. By way of example as to the kind of money they could extort from you under this system, even at "off-peak" rate, you would be paying approximately $1 an hour for dialup. (Dialup, may I add, that is statistically likely to be over a totally decrepit, multiplexed bit of copper that would be hard pressed to provide 20kbps.)
But it's their record on broadband provision that has made British Telecom the shame of the country. BT offer a service called BT OpenWorld (which, as per usual, comes with a stack of punitive restrictions on usage) that initally cost a ludicrous £40 PER MONTH. British Telecom dragged their feet for many, many months before it was even possible, let alone economically viable, for other providers to offer ADSL over their network. There are now (2003) some more choices available to the consumer, that is, provided you live in an area that British Telecom have deemed 'suitable' to have had its local exchange upgraded. Suitability is measured by the setting of a 'trigger level', which is supposed to represent the number of people in an area that need to be interested in subscribing to a broadband service for it to be worth their investment (independent researchers have estimated that BT's figures are inflated by as much as eight times the actual number of customers needed to break even). They still have only done (at a massively optimistic estimate) about two thirds of the population. Their high prices and extreme inertia and inefficiency still ward off most casual internet users however.
While they're not systematically robbing the British public, BT are making enemies elsewhere. Recently, BT have claimed that they own a US patent on (get this) hyperlinks. They've filed a suit against Prodigy and 16 other US ISPs to try and get them to pay fees for using their technology. WTF? Note that they're not trying to sue AOL. Genius.
BT also spend vast amounts of money on advertising campaigns, which do nothing except highlight the extortionate cost of their services even after so-called 'discounts'. Recently they've been making a great amount of noise about their (long overdue) broadband services, and have even had the bare-faced cheek to whine that the government should be giving them handouts because it's not their fault that they've stuck their heads in the sand for years.
The clowns we can thank for this mess are Sir Peter Bonfield and Sir Ian Vallance, who have since left with fat payoffs. Vallance addressed a crowd of telecommunications industry leaders and proclaimed that the internet was not yet widely used in business. In 1999. Bonfield once remarked, "Every Web site saves a tree and every email saves a twig." Yes, and your company then ploughs through a brace of redwoods just to print out my quarterly bill, you imbecile. His justification for his company crippling uptake of the internet in the UK for the last 3 years? "If the world were a village of 100 people, only 14 would have a phone and only one would be online." With a pillock like this at the controls, it's no wonder that the UK slipped behind even France (France!) in e-commerce success.
Oh, and I think BT turned out bad not because privatisation is bad per se, but because the Tories' particular brand of it was so spectacularly corrupt and half-cocked. See also Railtrack and the BBC for other success stories.