BT: Another day, another monopoly

It's not easy being BT. One minute they're a bunch of incompetent fools who are threatening to turn the UK into a Third World country with their dithering and dissimulation.

Next minute they're just too damn good, stomping on the delicate flowers of competition and private enterprise with a Soviet-era zeal for state monopoly provision.

The queue of companies lining up to have a go at BT for one kind of monopolistic behaviour or other is getting quite long - Bulldog Communications, Freeserve and Cable and Wireless have already put a public boot into the beloved incumbent and more are sure to come.

Yesterday they forced the access-focused ISPs to fundamentally re-evaluate their business models, if not take an early bath.

And today we get an announcement from BT that it's going to roll out 4,000 wireless hotspots across the UK - in essence killing a market months before the Radiocommunications Agency has even wished it into life.

OK, wireless LAN (802.11b) access isn't going to be the most sensational business in the world. BT reckons it might make £30m from it in the 2004/5 financial year.

But in the US, this is an area that belongs to start-ups with cute names like Boingo and MobileStar. But who now will compete with BT, which has the infrastructure to roll the service out almost for free, and has customers, a brand name and a big head start? No one, that's who.

Should we care? If the service gets rolled out quickly, that's all that matters. Isn't it?

Well, BT is concentrating on the corporate market. Easier to sell to, nice big accounts, not too price sensitive. So what about the consumers? Or small businesses and sole traders? Well, in a monopoly situation, they can all go hang.

The BT high-up that silicon.com put this question to seemed rather irritated to be asked about the fate of Joe Public in BT's new wireless world.