Gotta love Motley Fool. I just found out I can save over £600 ($1200) on my powerbill per year by changing provider. That's not trivial.
OK, this is insane, though: with gas and electric and telephone, you can have different providers with hugely different rates. How can this be? They all use the same resources and the same pipes. Clearly the other companies must be renting use of the pipes from the original company which put up the pipes.
So after they buy the minutes or kilowatts, they can sell it to me, and do it way cheaper, and still make a profit??
In some instance, like international phone bills, the bill can be cut by 95%! What kind of insane profit is the first company making?
Somebody is getting futtbucked here, and and I suspect I know who.
6 comments:
I first saw this in the UK with Mercury - the second phone company after Telecom. By hitting a blue button ( as speed dial to Mercury's exchange) they could provide a cheaper long distance.
I can understand this, because Mercury used a different trunk, and used Telecom infrastructure locally.
Gas and electric is harder to see. You use the same mains to your house. It will be fed from The Grid. However, you are paying for where The Grid is fed from, not how it is delivered to you. It is possible that all the providers are buying from the same generators, but at different negotiated rates.
It's amazing how prices drop with competition. Now BT's phone rates are competitive, but all phone providers are fighting cellular and IP phones. Heck, cable phones existed in Liverpool back in 94! It is cheaper now in 2007 for me to call the UK, or my parents to call the US than it was in 1993.
And a Matchbox car has been 99c for 10 years!
"Somebody is getting futtbucked here, and I suspect I know who."
I suspect your suspicions are correct. Lebanon has no free competition, only monopoles, and in the Arab countries the only place where cell phone rates are higher is ultra-rich Kuwait. Dreck, even the billionaire Saudi emirs pay cheaper than us!
P.S.: I'm good at zoology, but I've never heard of the Futt buck. Is that a little-known species in Rokosifredistan?
The futt buck is a deer deer creature, which makes for a good rump steak.
C'mon, let's play the word game:
Futt is a German slang word for bum.
And Dreck (as said by the doctor) is the German term for rubbish.
Pronunciation of futt as in "put". And dreck as in "heck".
Somebody is getting futtbucked here, and and I suspect I know who.
Like raw meat to a hungry jackal.
Actually, I found "dreck" in a Yiddish lexicon. Yiddish is also called "germano-jewish" sometimes. (Even the name derives from the german word "Judish", pronounced yoodish.)
"Hungry jackal"? Hey, isn't "Jackal" a TV series about young morons doing very stupid stunts? ;-)
Produced by two blokes named "Jack & Al", of course, hence the creative name.
I can picture a hungry jackal jumping on a raw meat pack in a supermarket chariot, and ending up speeding down a slope right to a thorn bush...
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