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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.