The Walker family, who live in a 150-person village in England, would like to upgrade their dialup Internet connection to broadband. Unfortunately, in order to do that, British Telecom insists that they would need to install higher capacity equipment for the entire village, and send the Walkers the £45,000 ($69,788) bill.

It probably goes without saying that BT has a monopoly.

They quoted for the cost of removing the box plus “40 joint bosses, 637 metres of fibre copper cable and 1,341 metres of mole ploughing cable”.

Mr Walker accused the company of abusing its network monopoly because he had switched phone supplier and had been intent on using a different broadband supplier, even though BT still owns and maintains the equipment.

He said: “They seem to be wanting us to pay for equipment which will upgrade the whole village, and that’s what makes it more galling.

“We just want the same crap broadband service as everybody else in the village but BT won’t even let us have that.”

Well, at least they’re not trying to convince anyone that the faster broadband will burn their house down.

Couple told by BT that broadband upgrade would cost £45,000 [Telegraph]

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