Infrastructure wonks: Tear up Britain's copper phone networks by 2025 The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has told UK.gov it should allow for copper-based phone networks to be switched off by 2025, as well as recommending a host of other expensive broadband-based ideas. The commission, which is a government body that tells it what to build, also called for the rollout of full fibre to …
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha does the NIC really think that it would be affordable to roll out a Fibre network in 7 years? I'm sure most would love this but is there the workforce available to facilitate this? I would agree though that copper shouldn't still be being rolled out with a move to Fibre for new builds (residential and commercial)
NIC really think that it would be affordable to roll out a Fibre network in 7 years?
Well, if we rolled back our wasteful foreign aid programme to an OECD weighted average value that would save us around £7bn every year. If we spent that same as Italy (a comparably sized and comparably wealthy economy) we'd have about £10bn a year to play with. If we cancelled the stupid, stupid idea that is HS2 we'd have £56bn+ to play with. Then there's other waste that we're on the hook for like Heathrow's unneeded runway 3, a small fleet of over priced nuclear power stations, or the whole F35 boondoggle. The money's there - its just it is being wasted on other poorly conceived infrastructure programmes.
I'm sure most would love this but is there the workforce available to facilitate this?
Cancel some of the other daft schemes above, or stop the smart meter roll out. Or address the UK unemployment count of 1.4m by making job offers they can't refuse.
Do you trust the average unemployed PFY to install fibre? Dream on.
Do you think all the local authorities will let their roads be dug up to lay the fibre without a hitch (especially in built up cities/historic towns)? Dream on.
What about the islands, mainly Scottish ones admittedly, who'll lay the fibre (specialist boats aren't cheap or readily available).
They need to do it incrementally.
Do you trust the average unemployed PFY to install fibre? Dream on.
Most of the costs are in digging and reinstatement that are manual labour. And if you've seen the herberts VM use to "pull" cables, you'll see that's not a skilled job either. The actual skilled labour content of any infrastructure programme is minimal. I've programme managed infrastructure investment of about half a billion quid, and I've worked for a range of businesses that have low skill labour operations. I do know what I'm talking about, and yes, it would be quite feasible to get a significant workforce from the ranks of the unemployed.
That is exactly why in rural areas things like B4RN work. Providing 1Gbit/s to the house to £30/m. I am currently undertaking a similar project to install fiber to every house where i live in a rural area. Its not in the UK, but as labour cost are not needed to be calculated into the initial build if you go the Co-op route (pay them back with the profits), it becomes significantly cheaper to build a network which a telco wouldnt do as it costs them for too much due to 'skilled' labour costs. Fiber is extremely cheap, it costs less than kite string. Its the cost of putting it in the ground.
When you have unskilled labourers you don't just put armored fiber in the ground directly, you duct it (should do that anyway) and blow or pull the fiber later and splice it, both of which can be taught very quickly not needing fully trained people as they would only be needed to supervise / fault check.
It’s all too easy to mock the “feckless unemployed” (and there is doubtlessly a minority who are that), but if fruit picking doesn’t pay a wage that you can properly live off, can you really blame them?
Yes, we should be grateful for the hardworking Eastern Europeans who do come here to take on fruit picking jobs, but for the main part, even they can only manage it by cramming themseleves into overcrowded accommodation (more people per room than probably entirely legal) and by knowing that it’s a temporary job that they earn and save at least some money from, before returning to the cheaper cost of living in their home countries for the rest of the year.
I'd vote for upgrading the domestic water supply network to dispense Gin instead of water.
So you're saying you (and similarly for other objectors) are actually AGREEING with the current spending plans of the shower of piss that pass for a government, and that those plans are either immutable, or offer better value to the country than a national fibre roll out?
>are actually AGREEING with the current spending plans of the shower of piss that pass for a government,
I despise Theresa May and all her works, but, yes, I would rather she made these decisions than you.
Our Foreign Aid amounts to 0.7% of our GDP. For a rich country like ours, that's just decent behaviour.
I'm not a fan of HS2 (I'd rather it was significantly faster), but rail capacity is sorely needed.
I'm not a fan of Heathrow's interminable blackmail - but that's not govt money (Heathrow will soak the passengers, not govt).
F35? Well, can't argue with you on that.
If we repealed the Climate Change Act post brexit and phased out subsidies to so called 'renewable energy' that's around another £15bn a year ...to spend on something actually useful*
* Shell energy review revealed that German, doyen of renewable energy and which has more nuclear power than Britain per capita, is in fact the highest carbon emitter per capita in Europe.
Thanks for Energiewende chaps, really worked a blinder.
Germany does need energy for steelworks, car factories etc. Sadly some are a bit dirty still, also in the East they are still burning brown coal, which is obsolete. Replacing the atomic capacity will also take some time.
On the ground, in Bavaria it is typical to have an electric car and solar panels on the roof, funded by juicy subsidies. There is a public charging point outside my house. The electricity is 100% renewable as it is owned by the city council who have their own windfarm.
The same "city works" have also rolled out fibre to 70% of households in Munich. They own the roads and the utilities so digging up roads is not a problem.
Maybe with Corbyn the UK could one day catch up.
Although Bittorrent is very illegal here, so I'm not sure what people will do with all the bandwidth!
I think the challenge you respond to...Was more about achievability than money. There are not enough specialists to sink the money into, regardless of the cash being available.
Most of the cost and effort of a programme like this isn't delivered by specialists, it is trenching, ducting, traffic control, reinstatement, access points and cable pulls, putting up cabinets and the like . You have a valid point about the fibre optic joining, termination and connections, and any power connections, but even in that case Openreach could get off their arse and train people.
This isn't unique to telecoms - when the government "invested £700m in bio-medical sciences" to create the Crick Institute, £465m was just building construction cost, not even including fit out - so a thin profit for the constructors, a fat profit for some property consultant or developer, but the vast majority into bricks, mortar, rebar, concrete and navvies, and bugger all really invested in science.
There's some easy wins anyway - legislate for common carriage access to all residential-serving networks larger than (say) 3,000 properties served. That'd take about three years to achieve, but at one swoop that allows access to VM, Hyperopotic et al networks on the same terms they offer their own "telecom retail" business, so they don't lose out. That then means no further action other than asset upgrades in well served urban areas, and Openreach can focus on serving areas not currently getting FTTP or cable. So far from being a £30 billion programme, we're down to about £7bn for what is primarily a rural broadband rollout plus selected urban areas that don't have FTTP or cable.
When the UK gives aid to poor countries it is mainly domestic producers who receive the aid.
If you'd care to submit evidence that more than a fraction of the £13bn wasted goes to domestic interests I'll take your point seriously - but even then it is irrelevant, its a huge sum of money squandered for very few beneficial outcomes.
its a huge sum of money squandered for very few beneficial outcomes.
Just because you can't see the intangible benefits of foreign aid (including, but not limited to: our countries perceived standing in the world (net positive), stabilisation of third-world economies (which reduce conflict, which costs everyone money, worldwide, except those manufacturing and selling weapons), reduction in migration from such countries due to conflict, etc. etc.), doesn't mean they are not there.
Whilst there may be a portion of such budgets which end up in questionable hands, I would expect it to be a minuscule amount of the total. It might make good headlines in the Daily Mail, but if you believe one word of what is printed there (with the exception of the tiny retractions at the bottom of p34, or published on their website at midnight on a Sunday), you are a gullible fool.
The foreign aid budget (like our EU budget contribution) is such a small amount proportionately, that it doesn't even show up in a pie-chart of government spending, except as a tiny sliver, less than, for example, what the UK government 'wastes' on VAT exemptions. Google it and learn something, rather than parroting bullshit spread to you by someone with vested interests.
The foreign aid budget (like our EU budget contribution) is such a small amount proportionately, that it doesn't even show up in a pie-chart of government spending,
Are you terminally stupid? Anything and nothing can show up on a pie chart depending upon its scale and the de minimis segment size.
Just because you can't see the intangible benefits of foreign aid (including, but not limited to...
Simple fact is that the UK is the second largest foreign aid donor in the world, despite having an economy that is what, the sixth largest in the world. In return for that we get all this prestige....hold on, I hear nothing about that. Ok, so we get lots of trade....oh, no, that goes to China, the US, Germany. Well, maybe we improve things over there....doesn't look like it, all the proper work on say ebola was delivered by MSF, not sluggish, incompetent national aid programmes from any nation. Maybe we prevent conflicts...oh dear, top beneficiarties of British aid were Pakistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Jordan, South Sudan. So nope, not preventing conflicts one fucking bit.
less than, for example, what the UK government 'wastes' on VAT exemptions
What's that got to do with it? I take it you are advocating reinstating VAT on women's sanitary products, and raising VAT on residential energy from the current 5% to 20%? Idiot.
@Ledswinger -
I don't know why all the downvotes. 33bn sounds like a massive number, but over 10 years that's £3.3bn/yr. UK GDP is around 2 tr/year. As a policy that requires some government funding, surely "having a 21st century communications infrastructure" ranks fairly high compared to "giving our soldiers new shiny toys to play with that are only marginally better but cost ten times as more than the ones they already have"
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Affordability is only part of the problem. Fibre doesn't lay itself and requires a reasonable level of skill - if you want it done properly. We're going to struggle to find enough engineers even if we import them from other countries - not forgetting that the current network will still need some until it's retired. It'll mean ramping up training (starting with colleges) as well. And when it's all done probably 90% of the workforce will be useless because one of the benefits of fibre is less maintenance.
"Without infrastructure competition, the existing provider has poor incentives to build new fibre networks, as this undermines its existing copper based services."
Except that there is competition. Virgin Media, Hyperoptic and some others that I may be unaware of have built (or inherited) their own infrastructure. Issue is that It only makes sense for them to build out in densely populated areas. Can't make enough ROI for more sparsely populated areas.
Oh yes, Virgin Media, the cost of their service makes even BT seem cheap.
Oh yes, Virgin Media, the ones that have not touched the cable (aka CoAx) in my street since NTL Laid it decades ago.
Oh yes, Virgin Media who are just using the Virgin brand name and have nowt to do with the 'beardy one'.
Sort of out of the frying pan and into the fire?
Posting AC as I get enough VM junk mail as it is. (3-4 items a month).
'Competition' in utilities is rarely sensible. How is it more efficient, economically, to dig up a street twice to lay two pipes instead of one? How is it more efficient to have two delivery drivers travelling the same route and dropping off at the same houses? The so-called 'competition' in gas, electricity etc is a Tory fantasy, that just complicates things. Competition between wholesale suppliers of leccy is a different thing entirely.
Same with fibre.
Of course, one needs an element of regulation, and I wouldn't like to see 'nationalised' utilities again. But Dŵr Cymru/Welsh Water offer an interesting model - a private company with a monopoly that is a not-for-profit! Of course, we have very high water bills, but that's a combination of them actually doing a lot of work on the infrastructure and them being forced (thanks to a contract signed by the UK government) to supply water to England at 1p per 73 gallons.
Are we all supposed to have an array of lead acid batteries in our hall to cope for this event ?
I believe B4RN offer a small UPS for precisely that.
A VOIP phone and domestic router don't draw much power and a basic box will keep them going for hours.
Or you just use your mobile phone. I'm on BT VDSL, but I don't have a phone plugged into our landline. I don't even know what the number is for it. Anyone who matters has my mobile number and I would use my mobile in an emergency...
And who pays for the UPS?
This also assumes the phone and router are in the same place. Our modem is tucked away behind lots of stuff and then the router is more accessible but isn't anywhere near where we would or could put a phone.
How many hours? What if power goes off at night and then in the morning you need to make that emergency call? Or maybe even many hours later?
I have three phones. A VOIP phone, that depends on the internet that depends on the router
A landlines that would still work on a powercut
A mobile that has no RF signal, but uses the internet to make calls and would not work in a power cut.
Mobile coverage is a shite as broadband outside of cities.
They cant even fit a smart meter (thank Clapton)
My thoughts exactly and I don't have a mobile and even if I did some provider's signal isn't guaranteed.
I know where my old, power free, land line phone is. It will (or should work) in a power cut, it's wired to the wall next to the front door. And the emergency services know exactly where I'm calling from when I use the land line.
"How do emergency calls work over a fibre link when something like a power cut happens at the house ?"
Well just like you do with copper lines, have an UPS on your PBX.
In fact, propper fibre links are probably even more reliable as you can do away with "curbside equipent" which is hard to power in an emergency. Instead you'd have fibres directly to your switching office which probably will have emergency power.
"Well just like you do with copper lines, have an UPS on your PBX."
One humongous one at the switch, regularly checked and maintained rather than a lot of little ones, probably costing n times as much to get the same capacity, fitted and forgotten and half of them dead when needed.
"One humongous one at the switch, regularly checked and maintained rather than a lot of little ones, probably costing n times as much to get the same capacity, fitted and forgotten and half of them dead when needed."
Well but then only one phone would work, and only if you unplugged it, plugged it directly into the NTBA (which depending on the type of your line your phone may not support) and configured it to work with the "emergency power" mode which not all phones support.
Well but then only one phone would work, and only if you unplugged it, plugged it directly into the NTBA (which depending on the type of your line your phone may not support) and configured it to work with the "emergency power" mode which not all phones support.
I think we're at cross purposes here. The UPS at the switch (or exchange if that's what you prefer to call it) powers the entire local POTS network. True if you only have cordless the base station will die without a local UPS. But it's simple and easy to have a POTS phone plugged directly into the line as well as the cordless set-up. Provided you don't exceed the REN you can have multiple phones plugged in.
"But it's simple and easy to have a POTS phone plugged directly into the line"
Yes, but that only works with old analogue telephones. And for that you'd need to replace the line cards at the switch to downgrade you from ISDN to that. Plus you'd need to buy a new phone.
That is all provided you can still get analogue linecards, which seems unlikely as ISDN carrier equipment is no longer manufactured and the equipment still in operation is working on salvaged parts from closed down ISDN exchanges and doing that with an ever increasing failure rate.
It's simply not feasible to convert an area back to dialphones in case of an emergency.
Unsurprisingly, photons are easier to push around than electrons.
Being that this is a tech site, I think it's worth noting that a 1U battery system for our server (singular, no redundancy, see "budget issues") at work is able to give 45 minutes of power to a server. I suspect someone could have a VOIP handset powered for days on a not-too-expensive chunk of lithium.
So they install fibre everywhere at taxpayers' expense just as the rest of the world moves on to something else, say mesh radio of some kind. When demand outstrips supply the price goes up, encouraging new investment in the supply side. Having the government plan things is a horrible idea.
"Hayek was right, the only calculating machine we have capable of planning the economy is that economy itself with its pricing mechanism." @worstall
There is no realistic alternative to fibre out there. And fibre is a technology which is easily ready for use for 3 decades now.
Having a dedicated pair of fibres per household will carry us easily into the multi Terabit age. That's far more than you could do with radio, even on a theoretical level.
Essentially giving up on fibre is giving up on bandwidth increases. Sure wireless might eventually reach 100 MBit/s on a fairly used network, however there are limits to how much a cell can carry and once you are at a cell per household... which needs a fibre backhaul, you might as well install fibre directly.
Surprise surprise Openreach is going down the PON route so it maintains control of the physical layer (as opposed to PTP fibre where ISP's can deliver their own wavelengths to customers). I would like to see more smaller companies, maybe even community non-profits laying the fibre to stir up more competition.
Should have been started twenty years ago when the first small-scale FTTP rollouts were already proving their worth.
Fibre should be a national essential service, compulsory for all new-build like water and electricity, and at a fixed price schedule so that rural users don't get stung.
The way investment is going, and the direction of travel suggests that come 2025, the UK could probably manage with dial up again.
Thats *a* dial up service. Why waste money on two.
Same as HS2 ...
Or, to put it another way, my company has just frozen it's (£2 million) expansion plans indefinitely ... which means our suppliers now have a shortfall, as to theirs.
In the NIC report. Chapter 2 is a seriously ungrounded piece of wishful thinking (and only adds up if they use the current price of Hinkley point C to compare against) . Their website keeps crashing on the contact page so I'm struggling to get hold of any of the referenced material in the report. So whilst I welcome their requests for better internet bandwidth and access I don't have a lot of faith in their research.
the conversion to fibre us amazing in more than one way. The sunlight on the streets is remarkably higher than when the sky was darkened with dense maizes of overhead wires.
At first VietNam installed high-capacity fibre networks the length of the country and then started stripping out urban copper. Very, very few installs, residential or commercial are copper these days.
The last few patches of copper in SaiGon / Ho Chi Minh City, a city with an unknown number of souls in excess of 12,000,000, are being stripped out and being replaced by fibre with a vengeance.
To read "called for the rollout of full fibre to the entire UK by 2033" is pathetic - if countries such as China or VietNam can go for the Full Monty, certainly the UK should have done so by now given it's small landmass.
Let's hope they install fibre BEFORE stripping out the copper in their hurry to meet a deadline of 2025!
Total naivete
Britain has pattern of residential occupancy that makes it very expensive to get everyone on to anything, especially with planning and environmental laws.
Half the cost of laying anything is getting permission to do it.
SE Asia, with little or no rural population is easy to cost effectively cable up
Try doing that in leafy suburbia in the home counties.
On my road almost every house except mine is cabled overhead although the main distribution is underground and ducted.
But on estates built since, say the '60s like my daughter's the entire telecoms network is buried. Unless the houses have individual ducts into which the cables can be blown there's going to be a choice: dig up every drive and garden, dig a trench into the street at every house at least on one side of the street and reinstate it all properly or tkae the cheap and nasty option of installing a mess of overhead cables.
I wonder which it will be.
@ Doctor Syntax
...dig up every drive and garden...
In a previous property we had extensive building work carried out, including a laying new drive. British Gas (as it was then) could only connect us after all the work was completed. They used some form of burrowing tool to get the new gas pipe from the main one in the road to the side of the house where the meter was to be installed. There was no damage to my nice new drive.
Round these 1890's parts they are running fibre to the top of the telegraph poles with a view, I assume, to fibre along the existing wires to the houses.
The black boxes atop each pole appear to be a small fibre distribution/patch box about the size of a cereal box.
The fibre cables go back to the nearest cabinet. It also look like they have added a few more poles and the fibre goes from one to the other along the street.
All seems quite sensible, no digging required.
But on estates built since, say the '60s ... the entire telecoms network is buried.
O really ?
I think you'll find that a lot of developments even today still do not come with provision for communications. Mother was looking at a new build, and the guy didn't put any ducting in while the groundworks were being done because "it would cost too much". Read that as, "I can get away with doing nothing and BTOR will string another half dozen washing lines from the pole" - with the subtext of "I don't give a s**t about aesthetics either".
Yes, the whole development (6 houses) was an exercise in cutting corners - and I believe you'll find that it's the norm.
So IMO the first thing the government should do is to mandate that all new builds treat ducted communications provision the same way you treat gas, water, electricity, and drainage - fundamentals that are "just there". Yes I know there are places without mains gas and so on, but would you really expect a new build to have no water or lecky - and have to dig up the new drive to put them in ?
I seem to recall that towards the end of March next year, there is a good chance that UK.PLC will be going broke. There will be no money left. Phone systems will be the least of the problems as rich Brexiters use the opportunity to but up all the failing in the UK and selling them to their Russian friends.
What is the baud rate of smoke signals?
Openreach also came in for implied criticism. "Without infrastructure competition, the existing provider has poor incentives to build new fibre networks, as this undermines its existing copper based services."
Back in the 1980s when BT was a world leader in fibre technology, Maggie Thatcher slapped a 10-year ban on BT delivering TV & video services in the hope that it would allow a break-up of its monopoly and encourage other telcos to step in. There was no internet then so video was the only reason to lay fibre in the "local loop". BT, with its massive network of underground cable ducts was still ripping out old lead-covered aluminium cables left o'er from t'war.
Wind the clock forward and all those cable TV companies that sprang up (and dug up all the streets) have now gone to the wall or become part of the monopoly that is Virgin Media.
We really were leaders, in 1977 we had a guest lecturer John Midwinter from BT Martlesham teaching us about monomode and multimode fibres which were going into use commercially in the next year. It all went very subdued by 1980.
Not unique, The INMOS scandal, There was government funding we had a breakthrough on memory tech of about a year ahead of everyone else and it took about 9 months to get funded by which time the exchequer could have pulled in a few hundred million or more
Shakes head in despair at clasics graduates wanker bankers and other non practicals at even shoelace tying being jointly at the helm.
And that unfortunate lady was in theory technical and a graduate. Check your private eye backnumbers. better still look at the academic records forensically. If I say what you may find, this post will be blocked by a mod, just in case.and understandably.
Fed up with no-one tech aware in the echelon making decisions badly.
"Ammend the housing act to require Fibre communications (or atleast the ducting for it)"
No need to nationalise it to achieve that, not do you need to amend any Housing Acts. Just add it to building regs. for new build.
Of course if you want to go back to the decades of under-investment that preceded privatisation you could nationalise it to do that.
Rural areas should receive full-fibre connections as a priority, said the report, which noted that "long copper lines" cause signal degradation over great distances and "effectively render full fibre as the only viable infrastructure upgrade option for most rural areas".
Let's examine that carefully.
I live in a rural area. There's an FTTC installation in the centre of the village and has been for a few years We're about a couple of miles from the swtich (or exchange if you prefer) and there's and FTTC cabinet at most road junctions where a branch of the POTS network is taken off; say about once every half mile. Once that was installed it was easy to connect any premises that needed faster broadband by simply hooking up their line to that cabinet. We're a few hundred metres from the cabinet and the FTTC speeds are good. Our distance clearly isn't great enough to cause deterioration.
We're one of the last reasonably closely spaced houses, after that it's fields and a few houses every few hundred metres in a network of lanes They probably do have a deteriorating signal. There's underground ducting leading from the village past the house up to a point a few hundred metres further on past the next road junction with a manhole just at the corner of out property and in the last couple of weeks there was a team preparing that ducting to blow fibre in as far as the ducting goes.
I don't know what they propose to do with that but I suppose one option is another FTTC cabinet at that point. Whatever it is they can make provision for the more difficult set of premises out there. It may even be that it's as convenient to connect some of the more remote premises direct by fibre.
But consider what the situation would have been if they'd decided to build out an FTTP network to replace the FTTC. To get to the point where the fibre reaches our house they'd have had to install it in about 80 premises that don't really need it before getting to those that do - they'd probably still be working on it. And if the FTTC had never been used and FTTP had been the approach from the outset I doubt it would have reached our village yet because we'd probably be a few million houses down the list as the network got built out. Not only is full fibre not only not "the only viable infrastructure upgrade" it's a good deal less viable for many purposes than continuing to extend the FTTC and make use of the copper network for individual premises because it will just add to the waiting time to get the benefits of fibre to where they're most needed.
>Q. Is he nuts?
Good Q.
Back in the mid 1980's we recommended to a company building a vast new research lab and hence expected deskside workstations to be doing molecular modelling etc. and thus throwing vast amounts of data around to install to every desk: 2 fibre cables and 4 Cat3 cables.
Well, I expect the building will have been re-cabled since then, given the speed limitations of Cat3 and the specification and development of Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a and Cat7.
With respect to the fibre cables, I don't remember the exact specification (as a colleague who specialised in fibre LAN technology spec'd this part), but as FDDI was the promising fibre LAN Standard, I expect this was the basis for the cable specification. Digging into the fibre Standards you will find that fibre cores and termination technology has changed over the decades - although probably not to such a great extent as twisted pair, but enough to probably make the mid-1980's fibre-to-the-desk obsolete.
So in answer to your question, I suggest yes he is nuts, as I doubt in the typical house any drop will be longer than 35m and thus a 10Gbps connection can be relatively cheaply achieved by the use of Cat6 cabling, which should be sufficient for the next 20 years. Furthermore, 24 port cat5/6/6a switches are readily available and quite cheap; I'm not sure about the availability and price of 24 port fibre switches.
Optical copper fibre?...surely that would be copper tubing......
As for affordability of the proposd project, perhaps we could cancel the Trident submarine replacement programme. Estimated to be around £200bn over the next 30 years, and that's assuming that BAe Systems don't put their prices up in the next couple of decades or so, let alone the fact that the US might decide not to keep leasing us their missiles/charge us more for them (that costing is separate form the subs, too ..deny us the targeting data (needs regular sub-24hour updating), or, within the next decade or two, undersea drones that increasingly map sub-sea features and fish stocks etc, won't become so prevalent that the 16,000 tons or so monsters won't be able to hide anywhere anymore anyway...................
At least 33Bn squid spent on full fibre roll out will have more payback (and hence more useful) than the 11Bn squid squandered on electricity Smart Meters.
Also, VM twonks still think that the copper Co-axial wire coming into my house constitutes A Fibre Connection - stupid cunts. Dumped them for Vodfone (50Mbps over copper), as VM keep charging me extra for the FREE UPGRADE to 100Mbps (from 50Mbps). Like I said before - cunts.
So local authorities own/commission the maintenance of the local roads. Funded through council tax. The transport itself is bought from service providers (carmakers and the public transport system that the roads put in reach).
For some strange reason this model is non-controversial.
Imagine:
LAs own the local last-mile parts of fibre, commissioning the maintenance funded through council tax. Service providers do the backhaul and value-added from junction points where several competitors can interconnect, i
That idea is thought to be highly controversial.
Explain?
Am I imagining it, or do remember Thatcher et al emptying BT's very full national fibre network installation piggy-bank to fund the BT privatisation?
Of course, if BT really had had the money for a complete network from scratch put aside, & had actually installed it, would it now be out of date & barely fit for purpose?
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