Kohl did the same in Germany by pushing copper cables instead of fibre in the 1980s since the former minister for post and telecommunication, Schwarz-Schilling, was the owner of a company manufacturing copper cable. Typical example for corrupt politicians of Kohl's CDU party.
> Typical example for corrupt politicians of Kohl's CDU party.
Schröder is SPD and he seems to be shoulders deep in Nord Stream controversy and Gazprom money. So it kind of looks like a German political class issue rather than a CDU issue.
CDU/CSU politicians are at least caught more often than SPD-related politicians. But Schröder and also Scholz certainly also have some skeletons in the closet (and don't get me started on the FDP or AfD...).
The problem with old fiber is that active networks are even more of a dead-end than copper. Active fiber networks leave you with whatever tech you buried and put up on every corner; upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line. It seems to me like in the 80s and 90s active networks were favored (see e.g. OPAL) - which would be far more useless today than copper, as copper's capabilities expanded hugely over time as more sophisticated modulation techniques became possible.
> upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line
That assertion is highly dependent on too many factors and even recent developments to be of much use.
That general assertion needs to be backed up with everything around the soil type, the copper diameter, labour costs, protocols and type of fibre, etc., etc.
And if you’re going down the route of having VDSL ISAMs in the field anyway then you’re certainly going to have the infrastructure there already anyway to support GPON over whatever fibre is in the ground anyway.
And are you sure that by “copper’s capabilities” you’re not actually referring to progressively closer deployment of infrastructure to the customer to overcome copper’s limitations? Because the move from dial any number to the local exchange to a node (FTTN) to now the curb (FTTC) certainly seems to reflect that more adequately.
Copper is still trash though compared to passive fiber... and expensive to run. Loads of electricity and amps required to use it and a lot of fine tuning and interference management and maintenance.
A ton of costly, endless work when you can bypass all of that by laying some passive fiber...
Do you have any links to Korea or Japan hitting these insurmountable problems? Last I heard they had better internet than the UK fairly consistently for decades.
Though, if they did hit a problem, just sensibly regulating shared national infrastructure of high industrial, cultural and economic importance seems like it would solve anything that came up better rather than shouting "free market" and "regulation bad" while you hand things over to American corporations in an act of brazen corruption.
> Do you have any links to Korea or Japan hitting these insurmountable problems?
You remembered me talks, about how enhanced was Hong Kong, so they in 1990s built very high-speed internet for all.
But than I read wikipedia, and seen, Hong Kong have 6800 people per square kilometer (Germany 200, France 300, Ukraine 80, Russia less then 30).
Sure, if you have more than tenfold number of clients, you have much more possibilities to pay for expensive new technology.
But even for not poor western Europe, fiber technologies was too expensive for wide usage until mid 2000s.
Sure, backbones built on fiber from early 1990s, but backbones is not all internet, in reality 90% of resources spent on last mile. And as I said before, until late 2000s, only copper last mile was economically effective without Asian density. Also was possible fiber backbone, and wireless last mile, but air speed also very limited (should read expensive :) ).
I talked with colleagues in early 2000s, and they said, Paris central parts with high density was connected to broadband relatively early, but farther distribution was very slow, exact as I said.
Maybe a first step to discourage this would be to restrict the time the chancellor or any minister can be in office to two election periods (like the US president). Sixteen years of Kohl and Merkel governments, respectively, paralyzed the country and hindered progress especially in the digital sector.
Lottery elections: put people in office like jury duty. You don't want to be President? Too bad! You're qualified, have a good background (whatever that is), people have vouched for your character, so ... you're it for 4 years!
I'd trust my next door neighbor to be President more than someone who actually wants to be President.
Liquid democracy. You can assign to your vote to anyone and reclaim it at any time for any reason. "Representatives" would just be people who a lot of people temporarily assigned their votes to.
There's what's called stochocracy or as Wiki calls it Sortition , but I think it needs to take the whole population into account, depending on where you live.
and using a polling system where even 20% of yes to a proposal (be it local, regional or national) allows a limited trial to go ahead... as to the larger question as to why our political masters are out of touch..power corrupts, vested interests and economic predominance in a society based on printing money to pollute the planet and producing a processed lifestyle.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#:~:text=In%20gover....
Because the US government isn't captured by corporate interests? They rank significantly worse than Germany on the Global Corruption Index [1] and on the Corruption Perception Index [2]. In a global comparison both are great, but relative to each other the US really isn't an example Germany can look up to.
The chance of a government staying in government for a long time also means that governments have to think long-term because they might still be in government when the consequences come around. In the US system the optimal strategy is to do things that look good in the short term but backfire as soon as your term limit expires. That way you look good, and the next president (who's with near certainty from the opposition party) looks bad.
I'd be more in favor of passing an age limit, but I'm well aware that that has no chance of happening.
People always be linking to the Corruption Perception Index, there may be no worse resource for assessing actual corruption: "The CPI scores and ranks countries/territories based on how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be by experts and business executives."
Singapore's consistent ranking near the top is always hilarious to me!
Democracies benefit from change. Indeed I would argue that cadre change is their kill app. But it must be happening.
The same top politician will employ the same ministers, consultants etc., thus slowly creating an ossifying structure that aggregates a lot of mistakes of the same type. It is a process that reminds me of inbreeding in biology. Small pathologies slowly become more pronounced.
As we live longer and longer, we run into a risk that our Senates etc. will turn into gerontocracies of 80+ year old people and that a typical intern will be fifty.
That is not the case. Otherwise, with regards to the war in Ukraine, Germany wouldn’t get this singled out when it comes to criticism.
In fact, one of the biggest domestic criticisms of the government right now is their terrible communication strategy.
English is the lingua franca and as such Anglo media has an incredible amount of power in shaping opinions in the West.
And frankly, the reporting, particularly from Anglo and Eastern European media, has had a heavy anti-German bias for weeks now. (Up from the usual moderate bias)
I don't think this contradicts their point... Others can be more powerful, but most of the time those more powerful aren't attacking them. The rest of the time Germany's PR is good and working...
I would measure the efficacy of PR as the difference between perception and reality. The amount people are disappointed by revelations demonstrates the extent of that difference. Germany has always been like this and the disappointments are recent. I would say that the Anglo-sphere has better PR, it is an essential part of maintaining an empire, but people tend to know that the Anglo-sphere is highly active in PR so it comes as less of a surprise.
> we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country
It’s by and large not, and to the degree it is, it’s open and not insidious. The kind of corruption that kills economies is the insidious type. (And the stealy variety.)
I disagree, VW/Mercedes emissions scandals and Wirecard (particularly the behavior of BaFin, which was defending wirecard and harassing journalists for years) point to entrenched corruption.
Nobody in government or industry has really been prosecuted for either (some Wirecard folks are on the run).
It's a corrupt country but its economy is big enough that it can shoulder a parasite or a dozen. Developing countries and eastern Europe does not have this luxury.
Hmm, that's plausible. I'd still like to see someone try to measure that though. Interesting thought.
I'm not sure Germany isn't experiencing negative effects from this though. Like the Gazprom thing, for example, this broadband thing, maybe even the nuclear thing?
Yea there are many examples of high level corruption in the german government (and most western governments actually, including the US). A recent example is the mask scandal with CDU/CSU (same party) https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-viola...
You will not find much local corruption though, which is what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries. Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of stuff. I’m sure it also happens in Germany, but that is very very rare.
My experience, having German family: Germans in general are very much about propriety and doing things correctly and are often very harsh if you step outside this line.
So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some structural fashion tied to political parties, long term associations, business connections, etc. that have the appearance of being practical, official, and "right."
A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a comment like this about western countries corruption vs "third world" or "second world" corruption:
In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic, because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe some local official to make something go your way. It's not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible" if you have some spare cash.
But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed, but if you're powerful enough you can control a political party and prevent it from investigating your company, have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from some raising some tax.
Yeah, I tried to explain this to someone about Portugal too... they didn't get it. If the system is completely broken and going to kill you in a "non-corrupt" country, there's nothing you can do about it as someone who's not a megacapitalist.
Yes - and Covid even accelerated this by enabling shady deals for the delivery of overpriced masks by CDU/CSU politicians. There's even a Wikipedia article about this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
Because corruption as an issue is overrated or wrongly defined. South Korea and Japan are mentioned in the article as exemplary countries when it comes to internet speed and infrastructure but both have virtually no dividing line between private conglomerates (Chaebol and Keiretsu respectively) and public administration. The same is true in Germany, but with few exceptions that kind of intersection doesn't matter because governance is by and large effective, which beats clean.
In fact this kind of conglomeration between the public and private sector is why they get things done, compared to the vetocratic nature of other countries.
German corruption indirectly affects the stability of the European Union, as they with France are de-facto most important players now. In the "new EU" countries, whatever Germany does wrong or hypocritical will surely be weaponized by euro-skeptics.
If my recollections are accurate South Korea had a lot of fibre laid by power companies that turned out to be useful for internet precisely because it was a corruption situation where there was an infinite budget and no oversight and they ran optical lines for power meters for no good reason and it turned out to be a win in the end.
Actually the cited article rather explains that the move to copper was also heavily motivated to support cable television which allowed to stream more right leaning media to households. In the end it is mostly about power not necessarily corruption.
There were some fairly large fiber rollouts in the late 80s/early 90s (OPAL, Optische Anschlußleitung). No copper meant it was impossible to deploy DSL, and available optical networking technology wasn't cost-effective during the first years of DSL rollout. Rumor has it that the old OPAL infrastructure can be used for GPON today, but that became available only much later. For many years, your best hope as an OPAL customer was that the incumbent eventually deployed copper.
I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been larger.
(The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)
Personal Profits and Kick Backs, isnt that the story everywhere? Democracies need to pass specific laws to curtail the powers of technically illiterate politicians when it comes to making decisions about technology. Perhaps there should be laws on how only Domain experts could make laws about certain field and the minimum requirement to become a politician should be that one needs to be a domain expert. And yes not a domain expert in Humanities, Social Sciences , Arts.
It's easy to look back with the benefits of what we know now and realise that this was a monumental mistake. But that's an unreal, and unfair, bias.
Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant, and the bandwidth requirements for it fairly meagre, even for those using it. The first release of an HTML spec was 3 years away. It was a novelty more than something fairly fundamental to modern life and businesses like it is now.
Fibre optic had a number of interesting advantages, but it wasn't a fundamental boost for Joe Average consumer. On top of the monopoly concerns, it was also going to take some significant amounts of disruption to daily life, digging up roads, replacing cables etc.
Before you could make phone calls, send faxes etc. After you could... make phone calls, send faxes. Maybe slightly higher fidelity.. but so what? Things were a little better and nicer in the distribution centres, but again, so what?
Also keep in mind that any 1980s fibre network would have been totally antiquated now. It already caused massive problems (TPON) when they ran fibre loops to push normal PTSN lines further.
No doubt it would have have to be all ripped out at giant expense, and would have ensured that there was no normal DOCSIS cable competitors.
Single mode fiber installed decades ago (for sure the early 90s) can still trivially be used to drive 10G and even 100G over reasonable distances.
It's a question of how the fiber network is laid out and designed. If you're doing things with any kind of PON components in "the field" you're limiting yourself to a lifetime measured in a decade or two. If you're doing things with active components in the field you're limiting yourself to a lifetime of a decade at most.
If you do things with just fiber to each house to a central location with each run under the optical budget of a 40/80k optic that infrastructure will probably last for 100 years.
I do agree however that to decide to do this in the 1980s would have been an impossible leap in logic for any government and judging them for not doing it based on what we know now is entirely unfair. Technically however, it would have been very very possible.
But assuming it wasn't a PON back then and was direct fibre to each house, the cost of the CPE would have been absolutely enormous back in the 90s and 2000s. The copper network would have been ripped out.
Instead of ADSL in the early 2000s (which was "fine") you'd have had catastrophically expensive active fibre equipment which would have made broadband completely unaffordable for the masses. I can guarantee everyone would be saying what a complete mistake this white elephant fibre network was when ADSL would have been a fraction of the price.
If you'd had a PON network there is no way that they would have planned the network in the 80s like you do now for FTTH. The segments would have been enormous and completely overcontended in the 2000s bandwidth boom. It would have required extremely expensive network reconfiguration to split the PONs down - the fibres would be going to the wrong place.
We know from countries that did go the fibre route that it actualy works out cheaper than trying to maintain a copper network as the copper you replace can be sold for almost as much as it costs to replace with fibre.
But noone went the fibre route in 1990. To my knowledge only widespread FTTH happened in the early 2000s, at which point there was affordable PON equipment.
My point is that how you'd plan a FTTH network in 1990 would be radically different to how you would do it even 10 years later. There is a chance that you could have planned it entirely wrong given the changes in technology which came about rapidly after that.
Was there any large scale consumer FTTH in the 90s (or even early 2000s)? I am sure the nordics had some very fast speeds but it was typically FTTB (fibre to an apartment block, then ethernet to each apartment).
There's no reason why the fibre couldn't continue to be used today with updated equipment on both ends.
Further even if it would be antiquated today, it would still have given many decades' worth of value, and we'd be replacing it with new fibre—as opposed to the lacklustre, half-hearted FTTN and other non-sense that seems to be going on today.
I don't mean the physical fibre. I mean the network layout. Common layout today is (X)GPON with a splitter with 32 nodes off it.
I imagine a 1980s network would be much closer to a DOCSIS style RFoG layout, but with far less node density than cable because of the much better reach of fibre. You'd probably have (tens?) of thousands of homes connected to one segment - primarily for TV. This would have completely collapsed in the 2000s as bandwidth use exploded, and would have required enormous work to split it into smaller higher capacity networks (this is exactly what happened with coax cable internet).
> It's easy to look back with the benefits of what we know now and realise that this was a monumental mistake. But that's an unreal, and unfair, bias.
> Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant
Sure the internet was nothing in the 90s but the telephone was huge, it was vital to business in the 80s and its popularity was only growing in the 90s.
With hindsight we know that investing in the telephone would have been a bad call as it turned out to not be that important, but at the time they didn't know that they thought the telephone and its network was vital to business. It was THE technology of its time, it was the future of technology, it was the most obvious technology to invest in at the time.
The issue is not that they didn't realise how vital the network was they knew exactly how vital it was at the time, but instead of investing in the future of said network Thatcher knowingly sacrificed that future to protect shareholders profits.
Lets not use hindsight to blind us from the truth of the time so we can excuse poor decisions.
The UK realized computers were significant and developed a massive education programme with its own computer (the BBC Micro). By 1986, the BBC Micro's successor has an 8MHz ARM (yes that ARM) CPU. Who knows where we would have been if we'd had cheap fiber, rather than acoustic couplers.
Fortunately I went to college. So I got to play with http in 1993 at Cambridge.
Then myself, and every other nerd I know, fucked off to the USA. Not fiber, but at least we had internet at the office. I bought my first domain in '95 and put a stupid website on it.
>Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant
Yeah, you're right. Best to wait until it is significant before paying any attention to it. Wouldn't want to go starting an online book store or search engine in the '90s. The fact is, the UK did know computers and networking were significant. But that evil psychopath Thatcher didn't care.
We ended up with that disruption anyway because the foreign companies Thatcher gifted the market to, NTL and Telewest had to dig up the roads to lay their low-tech coax.
Outside of the JA.NET educational backbone, I'm not sure there really was any Internet to speak of in the UK in 1990. When I got on in '93/94 there was only a few hundred of us that I was aware of.
The article is reposting of an old article whose sole source is a single person, Peter Cochrane. This same person is presenting a narrative where he was right about everything, but was ignored by politicians. He's now a consultant.
No corroboration from other sources or evidence is presented... It all just seems extremely self-serving. It's basically, "I was right about everything in 1979! Here is an alternate history where everyone listened to me and today things would be great."
Peter Cochrane is, erm, a character. Rumours of his antics abounded at Martlesham Heath. One story has it that he wanted ISDN at his cottage in the Scottish Highlands, which meant running many miles of cable (how many depends on who's telling the story) across uninhabited bogs and mountains.
Yes, exactly; the same for anything said about any (C20 at least) peacetime politician - blaming a person, after a decade or so, is just partisan clickbait.
Having been on the dole I can sympathise (was quite a few years after Thatcher though for me)
I think the biggest problem with Thatcher is she recognised the old industries were dead but didn’t do enough to replace them - Nissan Sunderland perhaps being one of her few successes on this front
It also easy to forget that the closure of the mines is one of the reasons our CO2 emissions have gone down - mind the demise of UK coal was as much Scargill’s doing and Thatchers
the classic liberal in me (vs. modern "liberal") didn't like her authoritarianism
but she saved the country by smashing the trade unions that were holding elected governments (both Labour and Conservative) and the rest of the country to ransom
Some of BT's early fibre rollouts were... interesting. In particular, there were various unlucky people who ended up not being able to get broadband at all because they were on BT fibre - as in, not even 512kbps ADSL, just nothing. That's because BT rolled out an ancient ancestor of current fibre technology called TPON that worked almost the same way as current fibre-to-the-home but was literally telephony only. They eventually ended up replacing a bunch of this with new copper runs just so they could offer basic ADSL.
I currently live in England, in a (city) area, where it's pretty much impossible to get ADSL. Openreach doesn't go that far. I assume it used to be a TPON zone.
Fortunately, there's a new separate, private operator FTTC network but it requires laying copper under our pavements and gardens for the last 10 or so meters. This also means absolutely no competition -- I either go with this company or I can forget about cable Internet.
Not sure you've got this right? There are no private FTTC networks in the UK. They all use openreach.
There are many private FTTH networks, but they'd be laying fibre not copper.
Also if you are in a city, you surely will have many good 5G options. You can get unlimited 5G broadband for £20-60/month depending on operator. Speeds are generally very good.
Virgin Media does not use Openreach, and they lay FTTC and then uses multi-core copper (coax) from the cabinet to the home. Although they're the only FTTC that roll their own as far as I know. The other non openreach are Hyperoptic and Gigaclear and they provide FTTH.
There are others. 6 months ago a small ISP called 4th Utility (https://the4thutility.co.uk/) wired my building. I think it’s GPON, their max offering is 300 Mbps symmetrical, which is a whole lot better than OpenReach’s lousy “super fast fibre” that painfully did 40 down and 8 up despite promising 72 down.
Ok, correct, I was thinking of FTTC as in VDSL. I haven't heard of VM being "FTTC" before. Though even most of VMs new rollout is actually FTTH, albeit RFoG (for now).
Let me tell you a story about the long-term value of fiber. I live in an area where the incumbent teleco is CenturyLink, though it was originally AT&T (pre-breakup) and then USWest (post-breakup) then Qwest (after a merger with a telecommunications spinoff of Southern Pacific Railroad). In the mid-00s Qwest's management realized that copper cables were a dead-end technology so they began rolling out Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) with VDSL service across their network. This allowed them to offer speeds of up to 140 Mbps on their legacy copper network and lay the seeds for an eventual Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) rollout.
In the middle of this rollout they got bought out by CenturyLink, one of the biggest telcos not descended from AT&T at the time. CenturyLink's management did not invest in rolling out fiber (I guess this is where they got the buyout money from) and basically froze the rollout of new fiber for 10 years after the merger. Fast forward to last year and CenturyLink announced they were selling off half their customers to a private equity firm. Coincidentally, the half of the customers they were selling off were primarily in the areas that CenturyLink owned before they merged with Qwest, and the areas they kept were mainly the ones where Qwest rolled out fiber. Apparently their customers on fiber were where all of their profits were coming from, while the customers stuck on their legacy copper network were extremely unprofitable to serve.
I'm lucky enough to be in an area where they offer gigabit fiber (from which I can get 800-900 Mbps down and pretty much exactly 940 up) but I feel very sorry for the customers on their legacy copper network as I can't imagine a private equity firm will be any more willing to invest in upgrading them to fiber than CenturyLink were, and many of those customers are in remote locations where their only non-satellite Internet option is CenturyLink DSL.
In this rural CenturyLink DSL area, thankfully a half-decent WISP moved in, and a local small fiber ISP is steadily encroaching on CenturyLink's territory as well.
> IBM’s Watson, the learning super-computer that functions through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth, according to Dr Cochrane.
"What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep."
Once we got a quote for getting fibre at an address that is about 500 meters away from the Googleplex in Mountain View. Ultimately it was more cost effective to set up a FedEx schedule to mail SSD's across the globe.
Your quote might have been “fake” and intended to convince you that they offer fiber to your address when they actually don’t. I went through this with Comcast in San Jose. Requested the service, weeks of run arounds and “we lost your ticket I’ll make a new one” followed by increasingly ludicrous quotes starting at $500 and then going up to $20000(!). All when the map on their site showed a trunk in my neighborhood. Eventually I started playing along just for a laugh, until they finally fessed up and said they don’t offer fiber in my neighborhood at all.
The telcos do all sorts of funny business and it can take them months to figure out if they can offer service to a particular building. Sometimes they need to send out people to actually poke around, sometimes they have to see if anyone else has access, etc.
If you're a big enough building or throw money at it, they can usually figure out a way to make it work - but it's unlikely to be something an individual wants to spend.
Not strictly accurate. Plenty of countries where the Telco monopoly didn't get broken up (NZ and Australia specifically) and those monopolies were in no hurry to spend billions rolling out home fibre.
at least we have super good fibre now. I'm on a 2GBps plan! I hear Chorus is even testing 10Gbps... If I'm honest, hyperfibre isn't really that much more useful than just normal 1Gbps.
what NZ did well with their fibre roll out was connecting up all the smaller rural towns (in otago/southland anyway) :D
What’s interesting about this article is that it lays the blame with anti-Trust actions.
The article argues that BT and AT&T if they were allowed to keep their monopolies would have allowed the UK and US to have far greater internet speeds via massive fiber deployments.
I have always seen monopolies as harming consumers and more competition as being beneficial, but this is an interesting observation.
Basically, in order to take full advantage of this system every house would need their own ONT to convert the fibre optic into something useable. This would be very expensive with 1990s tech, and internet access wasn't a selling point back then (even the BBC didn't have a proper internet presence until like 1994) so the way they hoped to make that money back was by bundling in premium TV channels - leveraging their existing telecoms monopoly into becoming a US-style cable TV provider except over fibre. Like, I've found a paper from the BT Research Laboratories about it and it has a lot of stuff about "broadband signals", but what they mostly mean by that in the short term is analogue TV (which is indeed broadband by the 1990-era usage of the term). This was not popular with the government, who'd prefer to break that monopoly instead due to them doing such a poor job of basic things like actually connecting people to to the telephone network in a timely fashion.
All the wider-scale rollouts I'm aware of used the cheaper Street TPON option mentioned in the article, where the ONT is in the street and shared between multiple customers, who only get traditional copper POTS service from it - and I mean that's literally all it can support. Telecom-grade audio at presumably the usual 8-bits, 8ksps, u-law. No ADSL, no ISDN, no digital data on the customer end of any kind, just POTS only with no direct upgrade path to anything else. Some of these continued operating and being a millstone around the neck of their customers until well into the 21st century, in fact it's possible some are still in use now.
Monopolies have the option of using their excess profit to enrich a few people at the expense of the customer. But it is not a requirement and that is also a good way to have the monopoly destroyed. Another option is to use the market power paternalistically, giving people services they didn't know they needed, planning for the future, performing basic research and R&D outside their current scope. Arguably there was a time when AT&T and its subsidiaries Western Electric and Bell Labs were doing this sort of thing. But they were also charging people an arm and a leg to rent a durable but low-functionality handset and preventing third party devices from connecting directly to the lines.
If you're interested in thinking more about it, Peter Thiel's Zero to One is a very interesting book. It's certainly not necessarily true that a monopoly ends up providing value like that, but with Google as an example, it's very unlikely they would provide so much open source code if they were in a vicious fight for survival.
> [T]he history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of.
It's not a good counter-argument because telecoms arguably have a monopoly power in the US and were dragging their feet in offering fiber up until Google announced they were becoming an ISP.
> telecoms arguably have a monopoly power in the US and were dragging their feet in offering fiber up until Google announced they were becoming an ISP.
One of those is extracting monopoly profits, and it's not the telecoms.
> I have always seen monopolies as harming consumers and more competition as being beneficial, but this is an interesting observation.
They mostly do, and infrastructure tends to converge to natural monopolies. The trick is to regulate the hell out of them. For instance in France the former government owned telephony monopoly was forced to provide access to competitors to their physical network, at regulated prices. And to follow up on that, today an ISP can create new lines to link a new city or neighborhood, and they have exclusivity for a fixed period of time - afterwards they're forced to provide regulated access to their competitors. As a result, we have a healthy competition with good prices (usually between 30-50 euros depending on package, max speed, TV options) and good speeds ( multi-hundred Mbit, up to 1Gbit is the norm in most places - there are even villages with hundreds of inhabitants with fiber deployed everywhere, and proud signs "Commune fibrée" on entering them).
Wow, time limited monopolies! How did they come up with that idea! We should implement this for copyright and patents. Oh wait, patents already work the way they should. It's copyright that is broken...
It's not highly competitive, but you can buy cable TV service from satellite companies or IPTV streamers and you guy telephone service from mobile carriers, the "phone company," and the cable company. In most urban/suburban areas you can ISP service from the "phone" company and the cable company.
That is a lot competition than AT&T faced--which was literally none.
The article isn't just revisionist history, it is pure fantasy.
Fiber technology was prohibitively expensive in the 70's and was far from ready to be used in residential homes. You would have to wait until the mid-90's for the "killer app" (the world wide web).
A plethora of multiple local monopolies combines all of the internal service (accounting, legal, compliance) duplication and inefficient fixed-cost overheads of multi-seller markets with all of the seller-biased non-equilibrium pricing of giant monopolies. Somehow, we got the worst of all worlds.
The explanation provided is actually counter to one we are often told:
> But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT’s rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.
> In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.
> This created a very stop-start roll-out which doesn’t work with fibre optic – it needs to be done en masse. You needed economy of scale. You could not roll out fibre to the home for 1% of Europe and make it economic, you had to go whole hog.
It probably didn't help that the companies in question all thought of the internet as a information medium (the next television or radio!) and not like a grid (a la a utility). So it wasn't clear that there is innately a natural monopoly.
For the most part, I don't think the companies in question were really thinking about the internet at all in this era. Typical intended services would be voice, analog cable TV and Videotex in the short term, with the intention to upgrade to digital cable and video on demand and eventually circuit-switched broadband ISDN that would allow you to effectively call up another computer and transfer data at relatively high speed. Remember, these are telephone companies - they were strongly biased towards thinking in telephone-centric metaphors and coming up with designs based on how the telephone network worked. There was a whole ecosystem of telecom-designed networking like ATM that was effectively rendered obsolete by the Internet and packet switching. (Even BT's internal systems and phone switching mostly run over their own slightly oddball version of IP-based networking these days.)
I’ve seen this before and I’m really not convinced that it’s not just another attempt to spread another negative story about Thatcher. As others have pointed out - hugely expensive project with limited benefit at the time, and not clear the technology choice then would have actually made a cost effective broadband project now.
> They had a market for product, TV and they had a company that wanted to invest in that market BT.
When people say such things, I always ask, Tetcher stays at BT with big gun and shoots investors?
Or how she could forbid investors to buy technologies and to create their own enterprise for this?
I understand, in exUSSR countries, like Ukraine, govt once just forbids private businesses to build abroad connections faster than 64k, so they all connected to bubble of state company (later govt created for this company 3G monopoly, this is very similar to history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company ).
But after 2004 in Ukraine, govt just could not issue any really serious sanctions for violation of such forbids, so ~ 5 big companies built Gigabit+ abroad connections, and later they also built their own country wide fiber backbones, and once those forbids was just cancelled, because non-sence.
For example, in Ukraine was state monopoly Ukrtelecom, and government constantly conducted policy, to prohibit private companies use technologies newer than in Ukrtelecom.
Because of this, before revolution in 2004, Ukraine has very slow internet (private companies allowed only 64k private channel abroad - more only from Ukrtelecom); than 3G was slowed, because only Ukrtelecom got licence.
Also there was many smaller law limitations in favor of UT.
As I said before, in Ukraine cheapest broadband internet in Europe, but only because Ukrainian laws are not working from 2004.
If laws in Ukraine worked as in UK, it would be impossible for me to write this text.
I think, in such case I would not be still alive, because Ukraine withstand Russian invasion with much help of self-organization.
BTW now Ukraine have very big troubles, because corrupted officials sabotaged implementation of NATO standards, and now, on 8th year of war, our army still using old soviet tanks/artillery/planes/etc and allies constantly repeat "we cannot give you modern tech, because you need much time, to learn how to use it".
I worked in telecom near y2k, and even that time, fiber equipment was prohibitively expensive for wide usage.
Yes, it was totally ready to adopt in large enterprise environments, or at large backbones, but internet is not just backbones.
As example, in 1999 i participated in building fiber ring across Kiev (Ukraine), but at my own apartment, I used dialup; in 2003 i bought subscription to wireless network (yes, from backbone to my home); in 2005 i switched to Docsis copper network; in 2011 homenet, in which links to buildings where optic single mode, and inhouse connections 100% copper; and in 2013 manager said me "we will never sell gigabit to apartment", but in 2014 I have seen ads about fiber gigabit.
Yes, I understand that Britain is rich empire, but even Britain could not spend so much money without real demand.
I live in the absolute arse end of nowhere Portugal - the nearest city is 60km away, over mountains, and the entire district (~50x50km) has a population of 3000.
They have symmetric gigabit fibre in all of the villages, for €20 a month.
In my apartment in the U.K., in a city of 300,000, the best I can get is 0.25/15Mbps - for £80 a month. It craps out completely every evening, down to 200kbps or so, as everyone streams netflix at potato quality.
> They have symmetric gigabit fibre in all of the villages, for €20 a month.
I often wonder at observations like this whether it's the result of massive subsidies or massive over-subscription of the infrastructure. How is actual bandwidth/jitter on that line? Romania also has bold claims about infrastructure penetration, it's a fair example of somewhere I'd have good reason to doubt their credibility.
A stable loss/jitter-free FTTP connection at 50 GBP/mo. is very much value for money compared to an equivalent line featuring loss/latency/jitter at even a tenth of that price and with 10x the claimed line rate.
Separately, I have put off gigabit installation numerous times over 6 years simply because I can't really benefit from it on contemporary WiFi.
(Also yes, on re-reading my comment I realize I am a bit jealous of your setup in Portugal ;)
Having worked with a remote dev team in Romania it was actually pretty solid. Fast to services locally peered, slower to elsewhere, but still miles better than what I had in the UK at the time.
And for telecommunications, which are definitely in the "utility" category now, subsidies for the up-front capital costs are warranted IMHO, especially as it can act as an economic accelerator.
As for contemporary wifi, that's why I had my house wired for Cat 6 a few months back - I've got 3 Wifi 6 access points as well (PoE powered, ceiling mounted) and can saturate my 500/70 FTTP connection.
I think the key thing here is that probably yes, however it is essentially once off. Not that expensive to keep shooting photons down the fibre once its in the ground.
So from a country perspective that's a pretty grand deal compared to say farming subsidies that you need to do annually.
Yeah, it was heavily subsidised - they’ve been on a big push over the last several years to get digital infrastructure into the boondocks. Contention is low, given the population - and I don’t directly use it, as I live quite a way off grid - but it’s the backbone for our LTE connection, which gets a comfortable and consistent 150 down and 50 up - plenty good enough.
We in Ukraine have cheapest home internet in Europe, normal something like 5$ for 100mbit copper, with 20mbit to abroad; 10$ gigabit, with 300mbit abroad.
But this is on "home-network" technologies - they have their equipment distributed over buildings and have not central core, so this is cheaper, but lacks some things which seem normal for telecoms.
It is very reliable, easy achieve less than 5 hours of downtime per month. Most downtime because somebody steal equipment from attic, or somebody tried to steal fiber cables, thinking it is copper.
very much. In early 2000 I consulted for small defense contractor trying to win bids providing internet to rural Spain. They made me cobble together an absolute garbage solution of slow early Sat (the ~1 second latency kind) internet with Wifi last mile. It barely worked for anything other than mail, browsing web was pure suffering, gaming was out of the question. Thankfully this venture went nowhere, but even with very expensive Satellite uplink finances still made some sense considering the remoteness of locations.
In Romania you can get for 3€ a month and you have overpaid then. I think it's no wonder why so many bright tech talent comes from the Cental Eastern European region. Accessible fast connections must have played a huge role.
Must admit, your suggestion is very close to reality.
In reality, need complex - good basic education + accessible from early school computers + low level of income in country, so smart people must figure out, how to flee out of poor.
For example, in Brasilia, all people play football (soccer) at least once per week (many play every day), and they have best football team in world.
Another example, China was so poor, they have not seen home computers before late 2000s, so now they have not hackers culture at all, and so their startup system looks weird.
Another example, I grow in Ukraine, with access to ZX Spectrum, and now I'm here :)
Coool. That means you can ask for a quote for 1.25Gbps which they'll likely have to deliver using 10Gig equipment at both ends and then *synthetically* cap, which will likely have appreciably lower overhead than running 1 gig through 1 gig PHYs :D
In my area OpenReach is planning to roll out their ultrafast fibre "by 2026". Not great. Couple miles out of Newcastle so not exactly middle of nowhere either.
Southern England is also doing quite well, with multiple competing FTTx operators. But it highly depends where you live (dense centre vs residential districts).
Around me in south devon we got fairly fast broadband actually pretty quickly (faster than my family who lived in the prime ministers constituency at the time), but then the progress (certainly for the same price) basically just stopped.
I lived on Dartmoor last year. I can testify that the broadband rollout stopped. We managed to get 5mb which wasn't so bad, the real problem was the connection would drop 2/3 times an hour. Fine for casual use but terrible for remote work.
The house we stayed in is now in the starlink queue.
We're stuck on 18/1mbs up in the rural north (and that's with AAISP, so we're getting the most the line can provide), B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North - which would have been 1gbs fibre) has stalled because of Politics.
I've just stuck an external antenna up and we're getting a decent 4G signal from EE so that will have to do for the time being. It's peaking at 50mbs with a bit higher latency, but the upload is 25x faster than the landline which does make for far more responsive usage.
Annoyingly, there's a full Fibrus fibre rollout about 10 miles south, but apparently there's no money in running a line up the main trunk road between the two major population centres for this area.
AAISP will also do line bonding, but you’ll obviously be paying more and I’d imagine it’s not going to be that much better.
I switched over to their FTTP offering recently and, while it’s not super fast compared to what others are claiming, having a router with a weird intermittent hardware issue reminded me of how good it is to be able to immediately jump on a call with technical people who actually care.
Just curious, for what you really use this bandwidth?
- I now see, 100mbit for one person is enough, I very rare see it is limiting factor (few times per month I doubt), but I can't imagine how I will utilize gigabit :)
Ah, yes, I'm now limited by small drives (I have 256G SSD and 1000G HDD) :)
Before, when paid per mb, I created accounting system, and seen very clear, after my hdd seem full, bandwidth usage dropped.
But something broken in dependencies, and I moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu, and on current unlimited channel it was not need to account, so I just don't bother, but I see difference when need to download ISO :)
Now I just for curiosity thinking about create accounting, make smart reports, etc, but on Ubuntu for this have to do much more work and much less art than on BSD.
Yup - seeding linux ISO was the first thing I tried when I realized I've got more uplink & compute capacity than needed.
It is still surprisingly thin...I set the limit at 5% of my pipe...and I don't think it has ever been hit. Not sure why but nobody is pulling down even close to what I could push
Sheep-it on the other hand...(think crowdsource blender renders) does actually push gear hard.
>But something broken in dependencies, and I moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu
Do have a look at proxmox if you can.
Proxmox + ansible was a paradigm shift for me. (Proxmox has a CLI so you don't need any funky third party module anything...you can just deploy VMs/LXC via straight CLI)
Sure, I use virtualization when possible, but I prefer Docker.
But for me now problem, that some vendors prohibit usage of their devices in virtual environment, so I have to stay semi-desktop.
For example, nvidia official drivers for desktop (game) cards, don't work in virtual env, and server cards are slow in games and have worse performance/$ rate.
In some distant future, I believe, will buy dedicated server machine, but now using desktop, to save money and space.
Two notes after a foreword: I do not know UK tlc development history and status, so I'm talk in general:
- things change, on small scale change is cheaper&faster in mean respect of large scale, witch means that a small country with few people inside surely spent far less in developing and regularly upgrading it's own infra respect of a large one;
- private investments on scale NEVER work for the public.
With the above statements, seen in the countries I know, TLCs can't be a private business. Nothing against private networks BUT the State must own a nationwide network, so create and maintain it, for the sake of the nation, not following direct profits. In that case copper or fiber does not count: at a certain point in time a planned civil design started to take into account the need of a signaling network for any household and more, so a national plan to create a physical infra for accommodating such network start. After a decade there is enough to see widespread results. A new network start to operate. Then new tech emerge witch can be accommodated with some modifications on the old physical infra (duct etc) and so the State start making changes and upgrade.
The overall results are less top performance in certain area compared to pure-market private TLCs development, but overall far superior performance. I does not count much if initial plans was better or not, because they are constantly watched and evolved so there is no such thing "due to the past decision on a certain kind of tech the new one can't arrive much early", it's just "due to a past decision new tech will cost the State much more and we will have a bit of delay".
The current GPON type fiber installation seems to be fairly future-proof. The fibers themselves are quality single mode fibers (looked them up - pretty much the same as in undersea cable) and at least as installed in my neighbourhood, the passive splitters are in accessible in-ground boxes with lots of room to spare for upgrades. About the only thing missing for some hypothetical future change is electrical power to those underground boxes.
Here's one of the first-level splitters in its box, before everything was hooked up. Note all the (capped) spare conduits.
So no shovels needed in the foreseeable future. Of course a direct burial of a no-future fiber such as multimode plastic would now be useless.
Unfortunately here, the entire installation is funded by Bell Canada, and it is theirs alone with no last mile sharing, and the price is punitive (on the order of CAD$135 for full bidirectional gigabit after the initial discounts expire, and nothing practical cheaper than CAD$85).
ADSL2+ was widely available from the mid-2000s onward. I remember having an ADSL connection from the now-defunct 'Be' broadband provider (delivered over BT / Openreach copper).
It was rated as 'up to' 24Mbit/s down and I got sustained download rates of 17Mbit/s.
Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) was great for broadband options.
LLU, and now the successor to it with FTTX where OpenReach manages the last mile and has a capped fee they can charge ISP's has done wonders for competition in the broadband space.
You have "pack em in and sell it cheap" providers like PlusNet, super techy focussed providers like AAISP (and to a lesser extend Zen) and those in the middle.
I used Andrew & Arnold for a while when they offered bonded ADSL, i.e. a single virtual internet connection carried over two pairs of copper. It was plenty for our office of 10-15 people.
ISTR having to use a PC as a router, with a special ADSL whose chipset was supported by some special 'bonded adsl' linux or *bsd distribution.
You can think of the internet connection consisting of two parts:
1. The copper from your home to the exchange.
2. Everything from the exchange to the rest of the internet.
LLU meant that we had options for #2. Not all providers were the same. Some had better networks, better peering with other networks etc. than others. Or they had more infrastructure per customer.
However, #1 was also a bottleneck. Where I live (in San Francisco) all the available copper pairs are in such a state that ADSL will only get me something like 3MBit/s at the best of times. And there's no way to get that copper upgraded. So whether I order ADSL from AT&T or Sonic, the connection will be bad.*
Perhaps your situation was similar?
* Thankfully both Monkey Brains and Xfinity have good service at the same address.
> 2. Everything from the exchange to the rest of the internet.
Also, 1A - the equipment at each end of the copper. The CLEC owned the CPE and the DSLAM, the only thing which is the same for any provider would be the copper itself.
Yep, very similar. It was the same when I lived in LA in the early 2000s, but that was at the beginning of DSL rollout, so I'm going to cut Verizon et al a nanometre of slack.
I've noticed FTTP is now available to people served by wooden poles in my area. Metal poles or underground mean no FTTP. I guess attaching a box to a metal pole is an insurmountable engineering challenge in the UK. So some people have the choice between VDSL, FTTP, Cable, and others have only VDSL, or 5G I suppose.
Attaching the box to a metal pole isn't the problem. There are other problems such as H&S, expected demand (as the boxes have limited amounts of ports) and pole capacity in general. Poles can only have a certain amount of wire loading.
Those are not always straight forward things to consider when put all together and forward planning is also needed.
Yep i live on a managed estate full of old people who’ve lived here since they were built, only get VDSL. Management comittee wouldn’t even let Virgin install cable, so going to have to wait for them all to age out of the committee so we can get somewhere
I have FTTP in London and that’s how they’re delivering it - there is an optical box on the telephone pole and my fibre line comes into my house literally alongside my telephone line. It just terminates at a slightly different location in my flat.
I don't really understand the wooden poles. I thought it's a relict of the past but then again, I saw a new wooden pole being erected a few weeks ago, it had the junction box on top, I guess ready to provide the final legs to houses.
IMHO speedy Internet should be regarded as critical national infrastructure, and be prioritized for accordingly by national governments in coordination with their lesser jurisdictions (provincial, municipal). Let free market solutions co-exist, sure. Contemporary government can be shown to be highly inefficient, possibly unable, to realize it, sure. But do bring an end to barriers to the deployment and operation of nationalized Internet such as regulatory capture, incumbents free to hinder others in sharing cabling infrastructure, etc., and dismantle a barrier to your country-folk flourishing in this modern world.
She was why so many of us can't afford to buy a house on what we earn. This is where the anger comes from. And currently we're very angry with the Tories over many things, energy costs, cost of living and the outbreak of Pinocchio's disease at Number 10.
Labour also helped make housing unaffordable the average cost tripling under their watch. While they were in power I saw my ability to buy a house erode, outstripping my ability to borrow on my salary, even as a fresh graduate.
Is she? People couldnt afford to buy houses in the 1980s, which is why 40% of the population lived in council housing. High rates of home ownership are a generational anomaly, not the norm.
The 1983 election saw a 1.5% swing of the vote away from the Conservative party; the Conservatives gained 58 seats largely due to the splitting of the vote between the Labour and Alliance parties - taking 61% of the seats with only about 42% of the vote. The 1987 election was along the same lines.
That these victories were landslides says more about the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system than it does about the popularity of the Conservative party from 1979-1987.
Frankie Boyle on the subject: "Three Million for the funeral of Margaret Thatcher? For 3 Million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person."
There is no other public person that one can be so unabashedly disgusting about. Not even Hitler, Stalin or Mao, all three literal mass murderers, get this kind of reception in each and every thread about them. What is it about Thatcher that makes celebrating her death and wishing to desecrate her corps somehow okay?
You might want to read up on some of the things she did whilst in power.
Supported the Pinochet regime for starters, as well as the behind the scenes behaviour in the miners strike. Right to buy leading to a shortage of council houses which persists to this day, etc. etc.
But no, people saying mean things is the REAL problem.
> You might want to read up on some of the things she did whilst in power.
I know what she did
compared to say, Tony Blair, in terms of foreign policy she was a saint
> But no, people saying mean things is the REAL problem.
nice straw man
> Right to buy leading to a shortage of council houses which persists to this day, etc. etc.
it's not as if we've had 10 or so subsequent governments that could have abolished right to buy, is it?
quite why some adult's behaviour becomes worse than average 12 year old playing xbox every time Margaret Thatcher is mentioned I really don't understand
(I know why really... it's the the ultimate virtue signal for the tolerant left)
Abolishing right to buy once it had happened was bolting the stable door after the horse had bolted. The council housing stock was already gone.
And we're not talking about her foreign policy per se (Pinochet excluded) but the toll she, and the party, inflicted on a large proportion of the population.
LGBTQ+ people in particular were affected by Section 28.
But no, you've glibly responded to what is obviously a retelling of an OLD joke to paint anyone left of her as evil, adding nothing at all to the conversation other than more political point scoring.
> Abolishing right to buy once it had happened was bolting the stable door after the horse had bolted. The council housing stock was already gone.
the next 32 years of governments were more than capable of building more
they fact they didn't... is Thatcher's fault?
> And we're not talking about her foreign policy per se (Pinochet excluded)
you brought it up
> LGBTQ+ people in particular were affected by Section 28.
yes, agreed
> But no, you've glibly responded to what is obviously a retelling of an OLD joke to paint anyone left of her as evil, adding nothing at all to the conversation other than more political point scoring.
It seems in the UK if you want decent internet your best bet is with an AltNet.
Openreach have limited upload speeds even on their FTTP offering, I’m guessing because of the limitations of GPON and their commitments to minimum speeds.
There are some networks that are popping up using XGS-PON now which is quite exciting as it can deliver up to 10Gbps!
I live in downtown Chicago and the best AT&T could get me was a 1.5Mbps connection. Comcast wanted $71,000 to do the install, even though all of my neighbors have Comcast already. I went with T-Mobile - I've got 5G via a router and I get a solid 300Mbps all day long. Much higher sometimes. God knows about the latency though.
This was in 1990. You’re telling me that at no point in the succeeding (now) 32 years did anyone in the UK government have the authority to reverse this decision?
That’s some pretty amazing power that Thatcher had that she was able to make irreversible decisions that bound all future governments until the end of time.
I think it's a matter of "to have good internet in 2022, they should have started laying fibre 32 years ago."
AFAIK the Government nowadays is doing something to rollout full fibre in the country, which means people in a couple decades will enjoy great Internet.
I always thought the UK was pretty ahead in the early 2000s because we dug up all the streets to install cable and got reasonable speeds for the time that way. Virgin was like 10 quid a month back then IIRC. And that was pretty much nation wide but some odd places didn’t get it.
This will hugely vary based on where you were living at that time - I worked for a UK ISP in the early to late 2000s and can't agree with this description of the UK as a whole.
Virgin's coverage has never really been close to "nation wide" either. Even today, Virgin Media's DOCIS network only reaches about half the premises in the country. It was far less in the early 2000s! Virgin also only acquired the Telewest cable network in 2006 and didn't rebrand it Virgin Media till 2007.
The peter cochrane mentioned in the article used to write a tech column aimed at teenagers in the late 90s. He would even respond to very dumb questions. An under appreciated uk tech legend!
This 2017 article, as is usual for the genre, makes several predictions that, even this short time later, are hilariously wrong.
> IBM’s Watson, the learning super-computer that functions through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth
Not actually very useful? Few commercial applications? Massively over-hyped? No, the problem was, according to this article, "lack of bandwidth". Huh.
> It’s going to change everything, from investment banking to the legal industry. That sort of service, being able to get remote diagnostics, can only occur if you’ve got bandwidth.
This sounds like something where you'd really be missing out. Maybe some Korean readers can chime in about the amazing remote diagnostics they have there now thanks to the universal free symmetric Internet access and IBM Watson?
> The UK will be frozen out of cloud computing because we don’t have bandwidth
The biggest cloud providers are US companies, but they have UK data centres as you'd expect. Most people I know use some cloud services (especially cloud data storage) and "we don't have bandwidth" doesn't tend to show up as a problem beyond, as in this article, people who just won't pay to go any faster...
... and that's the important twist in this.
Providers will charge you more for the better service, and some people expected that to be free even though providing it costs more. The vast majority of the UK (more than 97% of UK households) could get >30Mbps Internet. But that would cost money, and many of them would rather not. This wasn't done by Margaret Thatcher (unless you have it in your head that a famous Capitalist suddenly wanted to give away a valuable service free) it's our friend the Free Market.
You can buy 1Gbps symmetric in my street (and most of the city). Few people do, most of the people I know who've bought that service did so because the 40Mbps or 80Mbps vDSL they were used to isn't available at a new property they bought. Obviously Internet is a must-have, so the 1Gbps symmetric fixes that, but if the offer had been 100Mbps symmetric they'd have cheerfully paid the same price, which gets to my main thrust in all these discussions:
Always On is what matters. The most important quality of life change for me was getting Always On, not getting broadband Internet. For most people who experienced the upgrade they were simultaneous but I lived with Always On at 56kbps for many years so I know what mattered. From about 1996 I lived in a house with shared 56kbps Always On. Obviously we didn't video conference at that bandwidth, but most of daily life was the same as now. Got a question? Web search. After not very long that means Google. Downloads take a little longer, you watch TV still instead of Youtube or Netflix, but mostly it's the same. I would check my work in after a day or evening writing C, to a CVS server because even Subversion didn't exist yet.
In about 2000 we got DSL at 512kbps and that was nicer, but the basic shape of life did not change. Whereas in households where DSL was their first taste of Always On it made a huge difference and too many of them mistook that for a difference caused by bandwidth which it isn't.
I must agree. Above 10Mbps quite honestly even in the current time and age it does not make a difference for my use cases. As long as it is consistent it does not change my life if it where 200Mbps or 1Gbps. We currently have 50 Mbps down which is very consistent and even during Corona has not failed more than once a month for a couple minutes. All that at a rate of sub 30€.
Comparing that to the fiber offerings starting at 80€ and up i do not see the use case right now.
Does it make sense to deploy fiber in new construction and when upgrades are due anyway... Of course! But blaming governments to not magically forseeing which standard of technology would have great utility in a technology coming to life later is ludicrous.
it would have ended up dead fiber, like so many failed fiber rollouts from the era of "smart cable"
most people don't realize that there is dead fiber all over San Jose CA (it literally stubbed up out of the ground near the utility box of a house I used to own there, so its not up for debate)...part of a failed pilot project from the cable provider. probably severed or degraded in twenty different mystery places by now so no one will ever bother trying to do anything with it
https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... (in German)