Well some light at the end of the tunnel ; trigger levels are being brought down at certain exchanges.
Not before time in my opinion. BT were trialling a new 16 port Alcatel box to enable more remote exchanges to be ADSL enabled at an affordable cost. What they dictate as affordable is very questionable of course.
This is the box (I-MUX, DSLAM or whatever you want to call it) that aggregates all the ADSL traffic up from consumer lines into the exchange on to the BT backbone. Seems that some good has come out of the trials.
It has taken far too long. However, regardless of which ISP you sign up with, chances are you will still require a BT line into your residence. Even if you have cable it's only at far as the nearest BT exchange. So much for not still having a monopoly !
I still think that the BT backbone and gateways have too many bottlenecks and reliability issues. Something of course, that they will never admit too whilst still taking your hard earned cash !