>>What is ironical is that BT, who supply other ISPs with fibre broadband, actually charge far, far more than ISPs such as TalkTalk for exactly the same service....:-)
I assume that you know this, but in case others don't....
As a regulated industry BT has to account for the proportion of it's cost that is infrastructure related. It can attribute all build, design, maintenance, operation etc. etc. but may not allocate any cost which is not directly linked.
It must then supply it at that cost plus an agreed mark up to anyone who wishes to resell it. I cannot remember the margin, but it's not very big. 6% maybe?
It must also provide the same uptime and fix times that it supplies to itself to those same resellers.
For their own business then BT will add every other cost they have according to services or packages they offer, guarantees or support, etc. etc. plus of course their own overhead costs and their own profit margin to come up with their retail price.
And BT is an expensive company to run for a variety of indefensible reasons and for some defensible ones.
Consequently, a company which is cheaper to run, even a wholly owned subsidiary, will be able to attribute much less in the way of overhead cost and charge a lower resultant retail price even while maintaining a reasonable profit margin.
Typically resellers will offer a closer to vanilla package whereas BT will offer more complex layered services. Whereas the reseller may offer a different service bundles by reselling [say] TV, Cell phone and ISP from competing suppliers in the same package.
Also typically with a narrower and smaller customer base, they can take a different, and frequently better focussed, approach to customer service.
AS you say, every supplier will have issues and to expect otherwise is unrealistic and naïve. It is how they manage and resolve those issues which matters.
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