Going commercial today

When I was living in Finland I managed to get a DSL service without having any fixed phone line.

Fact is, in Finland a fixed phone will cost you more in flat subscription fees than your average mobile bill, which is why many people toss the thing down the wastedump and take good care of their Nokias (there's hardly another mobile phone brand in that country).

But today I will turn this post into an advertisement area.

Yessir, mac is going commercial, and quite cheap. Give me a couple of beers (possibly from some really talented beermakers such as Menabrea or Peroni and not the Carlsberg/Heineken/Warsteiner crap) and I'll be your friend for the rest of life. Now here's the story.

When I moved to Rome I wanted to get DSL as well and couldn't be bothered with fixed phone service either. Not that mobile calls are anywhere near as cheap here as in Finland (changing operator seems to do the trick though). But my company, you see, pays my personal calls as a part of their excuses for not giving me a higher salary, so the hell with a fixed phone line. Besides, you cannot switch off a fixed phone, it bears a bulky annoying presence in a shelf that could otherwise be occupied by nicer stuff such as wine bottles and condom boxes, and I hate the fact that someone might be calling my home and not me.

So I wanted DSL, as I said. When I was in the process of getting a connection I learned about a new service offering policy. I would call it useless service at rip-off prices without attention to customer needs.

Here is how to implement it:

- bribe politicians so that you keep control of the last mile and the law that is supposed to liberalize it never actually takes off;

- oblige whoever wants to open a DSL connection to open a fixed phone line;

- charge 100 euros for activation (what the fuck?!? the phone line was already there since the previous tenant had it until a couple of months before I requested it! what am I paying with those 100 euros?);

- charge 35 to 50 euros every two months as a basic subscription fee;

- unilaterally include several useless services in the subscription, and charge of them, without actually asking the customers whether they actually want them;

- make it so hard to get rid of those services that people prefer paying for them rather than having to send twenty-five faxes to twenty-five different numbers;

- grossly understaff your customer care and be careful to hire only spasticated morons who cannot recognize the difference between a telephone pole and a beautiful Italian lady.

So I have ended up paying 210 euros a year (310 euros the first year) for a service I don't use just because I want DSL. Of course, it took them only 93 days to actually come and install it, so they really compensate for their ugly bundling with efficient customer care. Ah, and the activation of a phone line was mandatory before you could even ask for an ADSL line, so I paid 93 days of totally unused phone service.

You're a smart reader, so you're probably interested in this business. It's profitable, allows you to achieve 0% customer decrease and you can organize top-management meetings in Valencia watching the America's Cup regatta rehearsals from a luxury yacht while entertaining your corporate customers at the expense of the families who need to have internet. Meanwhile, we're lagging behind all other European nations in numbers of internet connections per person.

So you may want more info on how to start a business like this. Naive request, but I'll reply: just check the Telecom Italia web site.