Once a managed provider steps in, they want to "own" the configuration. You end up with the operator itself actually having to raise tickets with the MSP to change things on their own network.
All this becomes a huge issue if there's a major outage, as the MSP might not have enough access to actually get in and do anything.
Most telecoms networks are run (to some significant extent) by a managed service provider, in my experience. When O2 UK had a major core outage due to an Ericsson certificate expiry inside the core, it wasn't O2 engineers that found and fixed the issue; it was Ericsson engineers.
The margins as an operator don't make it easy to keep around the deep technical skills to be an expert in the network you own.
In Europe you'll likely see far lower per-user pricing due to competition. You'll typically have 3 or 4 operators with physical networks, and a number of virtual operators providing white labelled service over the underlying networks.
A standard target ARPU (average revenue per user) would probably be around 15 GBP per user per month. You'll likely get to that via contract users who you try to get on 22 GBP per month or thereabouts, and pay as you go users whose ARPU is far lower (maybe 8 or 10?)
Compared with the US, consumer prices paid are incredibly cheap - expect unlimited calls and SMS, and many gigabytes of data. If you shop around you'll get even cheaper still. In the UK you'd be able to get unlimited 4G or 5G data for 25 GBP per month.
Clearly the US has a much larger geography to cover, but there's definitely more competition leading to downward price pressure in Europe, in my view.
Once, I found out a contractor was so used to opening and closing tickets for themselves that they were actually gaming the system and using it as a way to correct payements for their services. Each payement went through at least two accounting services and yet it worked. Interesting discussions followed :-). They are still there.
[0]https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/
This article hits the nail on its head, and i can see it happening all around us, not only in the telcom/tech world. Boeing is a prime example for instance, but also the general death of manufacturing in the western world has resulted in this.
(EDS won the northen countries, BTW, and I think things were marginally better with them, but either way, things soon reverted back to a more flexible arrangement because product development was severely hampered and most OpCos ended up rebuilding their IT systems)
Europe in general has a fetish with subcontracting IT to the point where only the contractor’s can do it. Sometimes it’s the contractors’s contractor’s contractor who is the only one who can do anything.
in the short term this does not matter, because the company stays profitable, but long term this is resulting in a system in which no one has complete ownership and responsibility of their systems, which makes doing changes and innovating nearly impossible.
For instance, when I worked in US govt, best as I could tell all the real work was done by contractors and the govt employees sat around on their asses all day.
Headquartered in Switzerland, its German office was mainly just Product managers writing requirements. Most of them would do endless paper work and all technical work is outsourced to multiple contractors. One of the requirements of the Product managers was to handle all these contractors so that things run smoothly. Many of the product managers had PhD degrees or Masters doing this nonsense. Finally the wonder why the cost of their products are so high.
I have noticed that it is better in the United States where a lot of medical companies have a lot of in house technical experience.
The IBM guy is probably connecting to Vodaphone through some AT&T managed tunnel.