"We'd have liked to have given you more but Covid...."
Expect more of this in years to come. Every bad effect of dubious govt. policy will be blamed on Covid.
Among the economic doom and gloom of the UK's Autumn Spending Review, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak inadvertently revealed the sop UK.gov plans to throw to telcos after sacking Huawei from the UK's 5G rollout at the behest of an orange one-term president of the US. Taxpayers are set to provide £60m to help "diversify …
The Brexit bus claimed that £350 million per week was being sent to Europe for the privilege of EU membership.
Presumably UK.gov stopped making these payments after the referendum? Why not spend some of that money on corporate welfare payments?
Or better yet, spend the money on citizens’ welfare rather than propping up tax-dodging multinational phone companies...
>Presumably UK.gov stopped making these payments after the referendum
Nope.
Payments would have continued until the UK left the EU (i.e. the start of this year) as a minimum.
I suspect the UK has continued to pay close to the full amount during the transition period too, but can't be bothered to check: though I think the monies paid do count towards the total due under the withdrawal agreement
The UK will then continue to pay a proportion of the previous amount, in accordance with the terms of the withdrawal agreement.
The last I remember, total payments under the withdrawal agreement were estimated at around £35 billion, the bulk of which I think get paid in the next couple of years.
So regardless how much money you think the UK sent to the EU, it's not going to significantly reduce for a couple of years
In 2015, BT announced that they will be switching off the PSTN and ISDN in 2025. After that time we will all be using some form of VOIP. The roll-out of fibre has to be completed by that date else how will end users make phone calls? I live in a very rural area and have FTTC. But, even that is temporary as it used the analogue lines for the last mile.
Nope, seems spot on to me.
The UK 5g infrastructure has been fscked because of completely unsubstantiated hysteria peddled by a pathological liar.
The question is, will Boris now have the balls to admit he never really wanted to do this in the first place, now that he no longer has to appease the Orange loser?
As the Marconi (STC/Plessey) R & D site was flogged by Ericsson after buying the bankrupt scraps after the BT decision to put Huawei at the core of 21CN network - which gets not a whisper made by nut jobs like Tugendhat (furriner sounding name to me) or IDS - and is now a housing estate ... there is approaching fuck-all chance of any British know-how there.
Rural location and wasn't expecting to get fibre early on, if at all.
Openreach were in the manholes last week installing fibre - turns out we are in a rural trial area.
I've not pledged my government voucher (for £1,500) though as the T&C's say you have to switch within two months of "go live" or else they may come after me for the £1,500 as it won't pay out. Trouble is, I'm in a contract until middle of next year and would have to pay early termination fees. A pity, as I would be happy for them to get the cash for deploying out here where we'll probably never get anything else.
No it's not - that Bojo the clown promise has just been cancelled:
5G has the same level of security as 4G, which is probably quite a bit above what most broadband has. All US network companies put backdoors in their kit when the NSA asks them to. But, so far, no one has been able to prove that Huawei does for the Chinese and they provide access to their kit and the source code.
They don't need to - it's all decrypted once it's on the bits of wet string connecting towers to the rest of the telephone system, which is owned by suitably 'patriotic' companies that are happy to hand over all the data without a warrant in return for a free pardon
Matt Hancock defends spending almost £50,000 on Bong Bong’s Filipino takeaways
Health secretary says orders for staff were ‘possibly the best value food you can get’
Just nine orders costing £43,348 were placed at the fashionable “Filipino-inspired” eatery during April – and another £4,179-worth of orders placed in March, according to spending data requested by the Daily Mail and the TaxPayers’ Alliance.
“When people are working 18 hours a day … in the middle of a pandemic, of course I’m going to feed them,” he told Sky News. “It’s possibly the best value food you can get in terms of allowing people working so hard to tackle this virus.”
It's ok, because the government didn't give a fuck about care homes, enough pensioners have died that the State Pension payments are due to be £600M less than they would have been.
I'm sure that the government didn't deliberately have a policy of "let the oldsters die off to save money", if only because that would be killing off their biggest constituency.