17 ms·

Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed

266 points by car_analogy 5y ago

johndoe0815 5y ago
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. https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... (in German)
- guerrilla 5y ago
  It's funny how openly corrupt German political party leaders always turn out to be, yet we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > 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.)
    - radicaldreamer 5y ago
      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).
  - alex_young 5y ago
    That was 40 years ago. Do you think they are still as corrupt?
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Did you miss the last 40 years? Where's Gerhard Schröder work now?
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Ahem. Cum-Ex
    - johndoe0815 5y ago
      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 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
    - Matt3o12_ 5y ago
      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-violations-of-ethical-standards/a-56833018 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.
      - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
        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.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    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.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Or just ban public officials from holding stock and from taking on jobs at state clients...
      - hetspookjee 5y ago
        They'll find a way, of that you can be sure. I think restricting the term is the only way possible to limit corruption in that regard.
        prirun 5y ago
        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.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
        fmmlp 5y ago
        Yes, Borges style: don't allow anyone who wants to be president to be it.
        5y ago
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Wasn? Bananen Republik Deutschland!
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    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.
    - RicoElectrico 5y ago
      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.
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      Both countries have reputations for terrible “big business style” corruption. And really good infrastructure.
    - JamisonM 5y ago
      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.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    It's because they do even their corruption by the book, so it seems legit.
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    Germans are really good at Public Relations (PR) but people don’t think they are, which helps them be good at PR.
    - lampenrad 5y ago
      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)
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        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...
      - cjbgkagh 5y ago
        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.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    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.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      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?
    - lampenrad 5y ago
      If Germany is a "corrupt country", than what‘s the rest of Europe?: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_public_sector_corruption_index/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_pub...
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        You're begging the question. My original point is that it's very surprising that Germany gets these ratings despite them being openly corrupt.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    maybe because they get exposed, then fail re-election
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > 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.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    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...). There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_um_Politiker_in_der_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_u...
    - coob 5y ago
      Scholz has also consistently lied about not blocking getting heavy weapons to Ukraine.
- riedel 5y ago
  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.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  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.
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    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...
  - quink 5y ago
    > 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.
    - gopher_space 5y ago
      Are there more people available to work on one vs the other, or would you be trained to handle both?
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    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.
- fweimer 5y ago
  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.)
- WalterBright 5y ago
  All politicians are corrupt like that. Another reason why socialism is inefficient and uncompetitive.
- throwmeariver1 5y ago
  It was our luck google „Opalghetto“ and you know what the Telekom tried with fiber…
- pankajdoharey 5y ago
  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.
Havoc 5y ago
It is getting better. Recently got a flier that says 3gbps fibre is coming to my hood. (vs current 1gbps FTTB) That is in London though - probably not where the problems are on a national scale
- gambiting 5y ago
  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.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    The situation in the UK is shockingly bad. Openreach need to pull their finger out.
    - philjohn 5y ago
      It's patchy - I've got FTTP in Warwickshire, and also have the option of Virgin Cable (I'd rather not). But yes, if an area is in a "not spot" you're stuffed - which is why things like B4RN took off.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  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. Luckily there are a few new ISPs popping up now.
  - poooogles 5y ago
    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.
makomk 5y ago
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.
- odiroot 5y ago
  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.
  - martinald 5y ago
    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.
    - some-human 5y ago
      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.
      - martinald 5y ago
        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).
blakesterz 5y ago
I've never heard this part either: "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."
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  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.
  - 30944836 5y ago
    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. Some sort of fraud? I dunno.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      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.
- slyall 5y ago
  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.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
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.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Oh, monopolies definitely harm consumers - but even a wrong clock can be right twice a day. The US still has a plethora of local cable monopolies and we haven't seen incredible internet offerings come out of those.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    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.
- dangerlibrary 5y ago
  s/interesting observation/unsubstantiated claim about a counterfactual/
- projektfu 5y ago
  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.
newaccount2021 5y ago
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
mnd999 5y ago
Standard Tory. Sell off any national asset to the lowest bidder.
- diordiderot 5y ago
  Don't forget you have to force government ownership of successful cooperative businesses first!
mrlonglong 5y ago
It's a great pity Thatcher chose to be cremated otherwise there'd be a huge queue the length of the UK lining up to take a leak on her grave.
- mrsuprawsm 5y ago
  The problem with pissing on Thatcher's grave is eventually you run out of piss.
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    Hence the queue. By the time you need to go again ...
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  She's hated by certain segments of the UK population - particularly the media class - but that does not seem to translate broadly: - She won three general elections, the last two of which were landslides - She was the longest serving prime minister of the 20th century - In 2008 a BBC poll for favourite post WW2 prime minister put her at number 1
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    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.
    - physicsguy 5y ago
      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.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      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.
mrsuprawsm 5y ago
Another one of the many modern problems in the dysfunctional UK that can be traced back to Thatcher.
- youngtaff 5y ago
  Surely they can be traced back to the mess of the 70’s which Thatcher was very much a reaction to
kazinator 5y ago
> Immediately after that decision by Thatcher’s government, the UK fell far behind in broadband speeds and, to this day, has never properly recovered. I'm not buying it. I mean, you can only blame what Thatcher did in 1990 for so long. There was nothing magic about the year 1990 that you had to have the fiber then, or else you irrecoverably missed the boat.
- InCityDreams 5y ago
  - blibble 5y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week trade union domination over the government is now thankfully a thing of the past
    - naoqj 5y ago
      Reminds me of what Reagan did with the air traffic controllers. A real display of power.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      > trade union domination over the government is now thankfully a thing of the past Just not over the Greater London Authority...
  - youngtaff 5y ago
    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
jonatron 5y ago
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.
- sgt101 5y ago
  Metal poles? I've never seen a metal pole for phone lines.
- rogy 5y ago
  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
- Teandw 5y ago
  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. This kind of goes into it: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/openreach-update-on-solutions-for-uk-fttp-pole-capacity-issues.html https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/openreach-upda...
- tebbers 5y ago
  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.
- odiroot 5y ago
  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.
michaelhoffman 5y ago
(2017) > 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. Mmmmm, I don't think that's why it will fail.
nostromo 5y ago
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."
- BucketsMcG 5y ago
  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.
doener 5y ago
Very much similar to Helmut Kohl in Germany: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
Twirrim 5y ago
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?
- Lio 5y ago
  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.
  - cjrp 5y ago
    But that didn't cost the government, right? I assume that's what the main problem was.
- martinald 5y ago
  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.
  - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
    That's not true. 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.
danielovichdk 5y ago
Oleg Gordieskey
ricardobayes 5y ago
"Honk if Thatcher's dead" relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUlj48Rvp1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUlj48Rvp1c
- vermilingua 5y ago
  The problem with pissing on Thatcher’s grave is that you eventually run out of piss.
MrRadar 5y ago
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.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  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.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
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.
- smilespray 5y ago
  For me, LLU only meant choosing which company logo was on top of the invoice for the same, crappy ADSL service in central London. Moved away in '13, hope things have improved.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    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.
    - smilespray 5y ago
      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.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > 1. The copper from your home to the exchange. > 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. Source: Worked at a CLEC for more than a decade.
tialaramex 5y ago
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.
legitster 5y ago
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.
- makomk 5y ago
  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.)
gumby 5y ago
Brings to mind Thatcher’s famous statement: “There's no such thing as bandwidth.”
- _joel 5y ago
  "The lady is not for token ring"
quickthrower2 5y ago
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.
- giobox 5y ago
  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.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Must have been lucky. I wasn’t in a heavily populated area but it was in the S.E.
nailer 5y ago
Wait till you hear about Australia M, where they cancelled fibre for copper in about TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT.
kingcharles 5y ago
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.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
This is blogspam copied verbatim from TechRadar. @dang https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784/2 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
imgabe 5y ago
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.
- sph 5y ago
  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.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    As the ancient saying goes, the best time to build out a nationwide fiber network was 32 years ago. The second best time is today.
papaver-somnamb 5y ago
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.
refurb 5y ago
Hmmm... Head of BT has position that more investment is needed? That's like asking Pfizer if we need another Covid booster.
unixhero 5y ago
This is devastating to read about and it destroyed innovation and progress. Fuck this!
physicsguy 5y ago
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.
- Lio 5y ago
  The major point is that the UK had an advanced technology is in fibre based networks. They had a market for product, TV and they had a company that wanted to invest in that market BT. The factories, including Europe’s largest cleanroom were ready to go. The politicians killed that by passing a law stopping BT selling TV and instead gifting the market to two foreign firms instead for whatever reason. That was a dodgy decision at the very least. My suspicion is that Murdock had a hand in protecting his satellite TV business. As they say “it was the Sun what won it”. :(
  - simne 5y ago
    > 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 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.
    - Lio 5y ago
      She didn’t point a gun at investors. Instead she passed a regulatory law that blocked the incumbent phone company, BT, from selling TV to consumers. That was reserved for 2 US firms Telewest and NTL.
rswskg 5y ago
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!
simne 5y ago
This is silly :) 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.
kkfx 5y ago
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".
madjam002 5y ago
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!
MarkusWandel 5y ago
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. https://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?c1bd8b14 https://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?c1bd8b14 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).

266 points by car_analogy 5y ago

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. https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... (in German)

guerrilla 5y ago
It's funny how openly corrupt German political party leaders always turn out to be, yet we still don't consider it to be a corrupt country.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > 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.)
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    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).
- alex_young 5y ago
  That was 40 years ago. Do you think they are still as corrupt?
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Did you miss the last 40 years? Where's Gerhard Schröder work now?
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Ahem. Cum-Ex
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    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 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
  - Matt3o12_ 5y ago
    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-violations-of-ethical-standards/a-56833018 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.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      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.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  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.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Or just ban public officials from holding stock and from taking on jobs at state clients...
    - hetspookjee 5y ago
      They'll find a way, of that you can be sure. I think restricting the term is the only way possible to limit corruption in that regard.
      - prirun 5y ago
        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.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
        fmmlp 5y ago
        Yes, Borges style: don't allow anyone who wants to be president to be it.
        5y ago
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Wasn? Bananen Republik Deutschland!
- Barrin92 5y ago
  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.
  - RicoElectrico 5y ago
    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.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    Both countries have reputations for terrible “big business style” corruption. And really good infrastructure.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    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.
- foobarian 5y ago
  It's because they do even their corruption by the book, so it seems legit.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Germans are really good at Public Relations (PR) but people don’t think they are, which helps them be good at PR.
  - lampenrad 5y ago
    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)
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      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...
    - cjbgkagh 5y ago
      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.
- imtringued 5y ago
  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.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    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?
  - lampenrad 5y ago
    If Germany is a "corrupt country", than what‘s the rest of Europe?: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_public_sector_corruption_index/ https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/european_pub...
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      You're begging the question. My original point is that it's very surprising that Germany gets these ratings despite them being openly corrupt.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  maybe because they get exposed, then fail re-election
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> 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.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  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...). There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_um_Politiker_in_der_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_u...
  - coob 5y ago
    Scholz has also consistently lied about not blocking getting heavy weapons to Ukraine.
riedel 5y ago
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.
formerly_proven 5y ago
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.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  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...
- quink 5y ago
  > 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.
  - gopher_space 5y ago
    Are there more people available to work on one vs the other, or would you be trained to handle both?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  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.
fweimer 5y ago
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.)
WalterBright 5y ago
All politicians are corrupt like that. Another reason why socialism is inefficient and uncompetitive.
throwmeariver1 5y ago
It was our luck google „Opalghetto“ and you know what the Telekom tried with fiber…
pankajdoharey 5y ago
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.

Havoc 5y ago

It is getting better. Recently got a flier that says 3gbps fibre is coming to my hood. (vs current 1gbps FTTB) That is in London though - probably not where the problems are on a national scale

gambiting 5y ago
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.
- mnd999 5y ago
  The situation in the UK is shockingly bad. Openreach need to pull their finger out.
  - philjohn 5y ago
    It's patchy - I've got FTTP in Warwickshire, and also have the option of Virgin Cable (I'd rather not). But yes, if an area is in a "not spot" you're stuffed - which is why things like B4RN took off.
mhh__ 5y ago
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. Luckily there are a few new ISPs popping up now.
- poooogles 5y ago
  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.

makomk 5y ago

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.

odiroot 5y ago
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.
- martinald 5y ago
  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.
  - some-human 5y ago
    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.
    - martinald 5y ago
      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).

blakesterz 5y ago

I've never heard this part either: "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."

ricardobayes 5y ago
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.
- 30944836 5y ago
  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. Some sort of fraud? I dunno.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    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.
slyall 5y ago
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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

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.

munk-a 5y ago
Oh, monopolies definitely harm consumers - but even a wrong clock can be right twice a day. The US still has a plethora of local cable monopolies and we haven't seen incredible internet offerings come out of those.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  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.
dangerlibrary 5y ago
s/interesting observation/unsubstantiated claim about a counterfactual/
projektfu 5y ago
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.

newaccount2021 5y ago

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

mnd999 5y ago

Standard Tory. Sell off any national asset to the lowest bidder.

diordiderot 5y ago
Don't forget you have to force government ownership of successful cooperative businesses first!

mrlonglong 5y ago

It's a great pity Thatcher chose to be cremated otherwise there'd be a huge queue the length of the UK lining up to take a leak on her grave.

mrsuprawsm 5y ago
The problem with pissing on Thatcher's grave is eventually you run out of piss.
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  Hence the queue. By the time you need to go again ...
LAC-Tech 5y ago
She's hated by certain segments of the UK population - particularly the media class - but that does not seem to translate broadly: - She won three general elections, the last two of which were landslides - She was the longest serving prime minister of the 20th century - In 2008 a BBC poll for favourite post WW2 prime minister put her at number 1
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  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.
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    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.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    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.

mrsuprawsm 5y ago

Another one of the many modern problems in the dysfunctional UK that can be traced back to Thatcher.

youngtaff 5y ago
Surely they can be traced back to the mess of the 70’s which Thatcher was very much a reaction to

kazinator 5y ago

> Immediately after that decision by Thatcher’s government, the UK fell far behind in broadband speeds and, to this day, has never properly recovered. I'm not buying it. I mean, you can only blame what Thatcher did in 1990 for so long. There was nothing magic about the year 1990 that you had to have the fiber then, or else you irrecoverably missed the boat.

InCityDreams 5y ago
- blibble 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week trade union domination over the government is now thankfully a thing of the past
  - naoqj 5y ago
    Reminds me of what Reagan did with the air traffic controllers. A real display of power.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    > trade union domination over the government is now thankfully a thing of the past Just not over the Greater London Authority...
- youngtaff 5y ago
  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

jonatron 5y ago

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.

sgt101 5y ago
Metal poles? I've never seen a metal pole for phone lines.
rogy 5y ago
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
Teandw 5y ago
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. This kind of goes into it: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/openreach-update-on-solutions-for-uk-fttp-pole-capacity-issues.html https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/openreach-upda...
tebbers 5y ago
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.
odiroot 5y ago
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.

michaelhoffman 5y ago

(2017) > 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. Mmmmm, I don't think that's why it will fail.

nostromo 5y ago

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."

BucketsMcG 5y ago
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.

doener 5y ago

Very much similar to Helmut Kohl in Germany: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehen-statt-glasfaserausbau/ https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...

Twirrim 5y ago

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?

Lio 5y ago
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.
- cjrp 5y ago
  But that didn't cost the government, right? I assume that's what the main problem was.
martinald 5y ago
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.
- AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
  That's not true. 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.

danielovichdk 5y ago

Oleg Gordieskey

ricardobayes 5y ago

"Honk if Thatcher's dead" relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUlj48Rvp1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUlj48Rvp1c

vermilingua 5y ago
The problem with pissing on Thatcher’s grave is that you eventually run out of piss.

MrRadar 5y ago

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.

BenjiWiebe 5y ago
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.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

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.

smilespray 5y ago
For me, LLU only meant choosing which company logo was on top of the invoice for the same, crappy ADSL service in central London. Moved away in '13, hope things have improved.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  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.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    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.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > 1. The copper from your home to the exchange. > 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. Source: Worked at a CLEC for more than a decade.

tialaramex 5y ago

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.

legitster 5y ago

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.

makomk 5y ago
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.)

gumby 5y ago

Brings to mind Thatcher’s famous statement: “There's no such thing as bandwidth.”

_joel 5y ago
"The lady is not for token ring"

quickthrower2 5y ago

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.

giobox 5y ago
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.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Must have been lucky. I wasn’t in a heavily populated area but it was in the S.E.

nailer 5y ago

Wait till you hear about Australia M, where they cancelled fibre for copper in about TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT.

kingcharles 5y ago

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.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

This is blogspam copied verbatim from TechRadar. @dang https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784/2 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

imgabe 5y ago

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.

sph 5y ago
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.
- imgabe 5y ago
  As the ancient saying goes, the best time to build out a nationwide fiber network was 32 years ago. The second best time is today.

papaver-somnamb 5y ago

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.

refurb 5y ago

Hmmm... Head of BT has position that more investment is needed? That's like asking Pfizer if we need another Covid booster.

unixhero 5y ago

This is devastating to read about and it destroyed innovation and progress. Fuck this!

physicsguy 5y ago

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.

Lio 5y ago
The major point is that the UK had an advanced technology is in fibre based networks. They had a market for product, TV and they had a company that wanted to invest in that market BT. The factories, including Europe’s largest cleanroom were ready to go. The politicians killed that by passing a law stopping BT selling TV and instead gifting the market to two foreign firms instead for whatever reason. That was a dodgy decision at the very least. My suspicion is that Murdock had a hand in protecting his satellite TV business. As they say “it was the Sun what won it”. :(
- simne 5y ago
  > 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 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.
  - Lio 5y ago
    She didn’t point a gun at investors. Instead she passed a regulatory law that blocked the incumbent phone company, BT, from selling TV to consumers. That was reserved for 2 US firms Telewest and NTL.

rswskg 5y ago

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!

simne 5y ago

This is silly :) 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.

kkfx 5y ago

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".

madjam002 5y ago

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!

MarkusWandel 5y ago

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. https://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?c1bd8b14 https://wandel.ca/pic.cgi?c1bd8b14 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).