I’m old enough to remember when the telephone system was state owned and state controlled. It was a system that although it had its small areas of innovation and brilliance, such as those who developed Prestel an early attempt at a consumer online information system, it was not exactly what you could term ‘customer focussed’. If you wanted a telephone then it was Post Office Telephones, later British Telecommunications (BT) or nothing. There was no competition and there were extreme waits for telephone installation. The infrastructure also creaked to such an extent that party lines where two customers shared one line and take turns using it and basically had no phone privacy was all that BT offered the customer in some areas. The quote below from The Conservative Woman’s comment section draws a comparison between the idleness and arrogant treatment of customers under BT and the behaviour and attitude of the BBC. I find it difficult to disagree with this commenters, Andrew Mitchell’s assessment.

If you want to see how this is going to go for the BBC, you only need look back at BT, it may seem strange now but at one time the only telephone provider in this country was BT, and due to their position they did exactly what the BBC are doing now, basically taking this piss out of the British public, ignoring those who complained that getting a phone in their house would take over two months, or getting a phone line fixed could also take months, they were ignored by the BT top execs because at the end of the day, if you wanted a phone you had to use them, because BT were the one and only telecoms business in the UK that should have meant that the minute the sector was opened up to other businesses, BT should have been so far ahead of them that they remained as number one, that hasn’t happened, every year since the market was opened up BT’s share has gone down, and the BBC is doing exactly the same thing, ignoring the people, ignoring complaints, standing by the bias they know is running throughout the business, and why? Because if you have a TV you pay the BBC, in other words their nice and comfortable, but they should wake up to the fact that a comfortable company is a vulnerable company, the day is going to come when they lose their one provider strangle hold over the people, and when that happens just like BT they’ll end up losing that number one position, sadly for them is the fact that once they lose the licence fee, they won’t reduce year on year, their business will drop like a brick and it will be the end for the BBC, if their execs can’t see this, then they shouldn’t be BBC execs!