Applied for a BSNL ( a sarkari phone company in India ) landline and was told that it will be available in a couple of days. Time was when you had to wait between five to eight years for a telephone. Even today the application form comes with a page for nominating your connection to someone in case of your demise. Much like nominating your bank account or provident fund. That is how precious a phone connection in India used to be just 15 years ago. Then the Americans started threatening us because their phone companies were having to pay exorbitant connection charges for calls made by the million or so expats living in the US. That forced the politicians to open up the market and today even sarkari fellows are promising a connection in two days. Not only that it is accompanied by a broad smile showing all the paan stained teeth. A small proof that competition improves service. However not all utilities are open to competition and private monopoly is a million times worse than a sarkari one. For instance water supplies were privatised in the UK. Today the service is very poor, some 20% of water is wasted because of no maintenance and bills have gone up astronomically hurting the poor. Foreign companies do not care about wasting water which is a precious national resource and there can be no competition because there is only one system of pipes. The British government had to renationalise Railtrack because of poor service. Enron managed to crook millions. Therefore, developing countries must never sign upto wholesale privatisation of utilities at the WTO.