It was once so simple. Monopoly incumbents in Europe and elsewhere built their networks and then encouraged customers―sometimes still referred to as 'subscribers'―to make full use of them. BT of the UK went so far as to coin a 1990s marketing slogan―"It's good to talk"―suggesting that, at the time, the company didn't feel a particular need to push the BT brand: if people used the phone more often they'd most probably use BT in the process and thus BT would benefit. Today it might still be 'good to talk', but increasingly it's someone other than the incumbent carrying the call. Despite the competitive telecomms infrastructure building boom ending spectacularly two years ago, new entrants are slowly but steadily gaining ground where it matters―in retail market share. As well as utilising their newly-built infrastructure, competitive players (often in league with new retail partners) are increasingly unbundling or reselling incumbent telco facilities. The headlines might still echo the wave of bankruptcies among new competing operators, but the statistics show that many are quietly emerging from debt to steadily erode the incumbents' core business. It's no secret that prices for most services, fixed or mobile, are falling and are likely to continue to do so in response to the telecomms equivalent of computing's Moore's Law.
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