It looks like there's some more contemporary context here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817403-300-technology-trial-makes-light-of-cable-network/ ht

It looks like there's some more contemporary context here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817403-300-technology-trial-makes-light-of-cable-network/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817403-300-technolo... Basically, in order to take full advantage of this system every house would need their own ONT to convert the fibre optic into something useable. This would be very expensive with 1990s tech, and internet access wasn't a selling point back then (even the BBC didn't have a proper internet presence until like 1994) so the way they hoped to make that money back was by bundling in premium TV channels - leveraging their existing telecoms monopoly into becoming a US-style cable TV provider except over fibre. Like, I've found a paper from the BT Research Laboratories about it and it has a lot of stuff about "broadband signals", but what they mostly mean by that in the short term is analogue TV (which is indeed broadband by the 1990-era usage of the term). This was not popular with the government, who'd prefer to break that monopoly instead due to them doing such a poor job of basic things like actually connecting people to to the telephone network in a timely fashion. All the wider-scale rollouts I'm aware of used the cheaper Street TPON option mentioned in the article, where the ONT is in the street and shared between multiple customers, who only get traditional copper POTS service from it - and I mean that's literally all it can support. Telecom-grade audio at presumably the usual 8-bits, 8ksps, u-law. No ADSL, no ISDN, no digital data on the customer end of any kind, just POTS only with no direct upgrade path to anything else. Some of these continued operating and being a millstone around the neck of their customers until well into the 21st century, in fact it's possible some are still in use now.