Maurice, I agreed with nearly everything you said with regards water. Economic pricing would avoid the crazy situation in San Diego a few years back: on more than one occasion I went into a coffee shop to see a polite notice explaining that glasses of water were no longer being served automatically. The idea was to save water, and it was pointed out that the consumption of water is much more than that which was drunk, because water was used in washing the glass, etc. Reasonable enough. Except that I had just paddled across wet concrete to get in because their sprinklers had watered the concrete in addition to the tiny piece of grass outside.
But why would you want the distribution channels to be owned privately? There may be a case for competition in supply, but it's not feasible to have more than one company running pipes into homes. Any private company would have to be so regulated to ensure consumers were not gouged, it might as well be directly controlled. Britain privatised water companies with much ballyhooing of obtaining private financing. It was a disaster: investment went into plush offices and inflated salaries, many new jobs were created; it's now seen as a disaster.
With phones, I wasn't suggesting that meters cost significant money, but that billing and resolving disputes do. You advocate providing service for free. You say some money would be made on selling phones. Not much otherwise people would bring phones from other systems. A competitor would have to be extremely well financed to provide the service for free. Yes, they'd get all the custom until they reached capacity. And capacity would not be reached just once, rather users would find it increasingly frustrating at busy times. Your company would then, and only then, start charging and receiving revenues. Many would delay their calls until less busy times when service was still free. Still the average user would pay much less than a Leap customer, and your companies revenues would be much less. The greater the capacity of the system, the more money your company would need to sustain itself before it obtained meaningful revenues.
Ashley |
