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Comment by g_p | Hacker News Reader

This is more common than many think.

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.

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Operator margins in the US are enough to pay billions for media companies, at least. But maybe more competition is allowed in Europe.

There's definitely a "side of the pond" aspect to this - US operators pay for media companies, but they likely do so to raise their margins, and I presume they're borrowing the funds from institutional investors to do this, rather than bootstrapping their acquisitions with profits.

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.

Canada's average ARPU for mobile customers is like 60-70$ I think.

More than allowed - in the EU at least, telecoms (wireline at least) is heavily regulated, and monopoly infrastructure providers (i.e. wire owners) are required to provide wholesale services and operate on those services for their own retail arms. Mobile operators have slightly less regulation in the way of competitition but there are similar requirements for vMNOS etc. So yeah, overall margins tend to be smaller and there's healthier competition overall, but telecoms is still flush with cash in general.

> You end up with the operator itself actually having to raise tickets with the MSP to change things on their own network.

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.

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