Re: Is the target obsurd?
There's money to be made (for somebody) in laying fibre.
Debatable. Looking at the market at the moment there's very little evidence of a mass desire for ultrafast broadband. Most people are buying the cheapest package they can afford. Only a minority of VM customers choose to pay for the top tier and historically VM have had to close their lowest tiers and migrate customers upwards for free because they won't move by themselves.
Also, looking at the market, internet use per-capita in the UK is very high and it has been for several decades now. What the market seems to show is most people are content with the lower end of speeds or at least unable to justify paying for anything better.
A last risk factor is mobile internet. While I will always tout a physical cable as being better than anything done by radio I was at a friend's house recently and they use a mobile adaptor and it seems to do everything they need including UHD Netflix streaming. Whether mobile internet could handle a sudden influx of people should FTTP not materialise fast enough is another matter.
For sure there are still some places (less than 5% probably) where residential internet is truly inadequate but it's hard to see where sufficient demand can be found to fund the costs of a complete FTTP roll-out, least-wise not a rapid one.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
