Tag: Radio 4

Rail Re-franchising: Be careful what you wish for!

Following in the wake of the moan about Virgin Trains, a good item regarding the re-franchising of rail services was broadcast in today’s BBC Radio 4 consumer affairs programme, “You and Yours”.

Here’s a BBC iPlayer link to the article – may not work outside the UK, and will expire in the fullness of time.

Tony Miles, a contributor to the rail industry magazine, Modern Railways, explained that the Government will be re-letting a number of UK passenger railway franchises in the coming years, and that a number of European state-owned railway companies are not only showing interest in UK rail franchises, but are already proving successful in winning them, such as the impending takeover of services out of Liverpool Street by Abellio, the International commercial arm of the Dutch railway company, NS, who already operate services in the North of England under a JV with Serco (Northern Rail and Merseyrail).

The Europeans are interested in grabbing a slice of the British pie for two main reasons, firstly because there is some money to be made, and secondly because the privatisation, franchising or deregulation of their home markets is proceeding at a slow pace.

Continue reading “Rail Re-franchising: Be careful what you wish for!”

Auntie Beeb on Net Neutrality

Earlier this week Andy D suggested that I might be listening to too much Radio 4.

I don’t necessarily think that’s been a bad thing, as that means I caught a couple of items on Net Neutrality. Indeed, the Beeb seems to be showing increasing interest in this area, and wouldn’t you, if there was something which threatened your editorial freedom?

Imagine for a minute that Sky Broadband subscribers got ultra fast access to Sky News (and other News Corp) content, while poor old Auntie (among other content providers) got packet-shaped, throttled and capped to a crawl? Now you’ll see what the fuss is about.

Anyway, Radio 4 has recently discussed Net Neutrality on two occasions in the past few weeks.

Firstly during the long-running consumer affairs programme “You and Yours“, on the 7th October, there was a brief discussion (will open a link to BBC iPlayer) which included comments from ISOC’s Leslie Daigle.

This week, on Monday 17th October, there was a further segment on the subject (iPlayer link) in the “Click On” programme – fast forward to around the 17 minute mark – which contains the fantastic quote of “Put three geeks together in a room and you’ll get four definitions of Net Neutrality”.

I’m not sure if that says more about the issue, or more about the geeks. šŸ™‚

There’s also a rather nice BBC blog article from Erik Huggers (Director, BBC FM&T) which incorporates and sums up nicely elements from both the above articles, including that despite the appearance of freedom of choice and competition in the UK consumer broadband market, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, due to triple-play lock-ins or the sheer aggro factor.

The closing paragraph talks about “thin-end-of-the-wedge” concerns about this gradually creeping in through the backdoor if the regulators don’t use tools in their power to manage this contentious issue.

While the BBC, as a major content player, do have a vested interest in preserving their editorial freedom and equal opportunity to distribute their content, there’s a lot of sense behind it too.