5 ms·

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 1

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.
  - martinald 5y ago
    But assuming it wasn't a PON back then and was direct fibre to each house, the cost of the CPE would have been absolutely enormous back in the 90s and 2000s. The copper network would have been ripped out. Instead of ADSL in the early 2000s (which was "fine") you'd have had catastrophically expensive active fibre equipment which would have made broadband completely unaffordable for the masses. I can guarantee everyone would be saying what a complete mistake this white elephant fibre network was when ADSL would have been a fraction of the price. If you'd had a PON network there is no way that they would have planned the network in the 80s like you do now for FTTH. The segments would have been enormous and completely overcontended in the 2000s bandwidth boom. It would have required extremely expensive network reconfiguration to split the PONs down - the fibres would be going to the wrong place.
    - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
      In the 80s maybe, in the 90s it was reasonably cheap to do 100Mbit over 40k fiber.
      - martinald 5y ago
        Was there any large scale consumer FTTH in the 90s (or even early 2000s)? I am sure the nordics had some very fast speeds but it was typically FTTB (fibre to an apartment block, then ethernet to each apartment).
    - dangerface 5y ago
      We know from countries that did go the fibre route that it actualy works out cheaper than trying to maintain a copper network as the copper you replace can be sold for almost as much as it costs to replace with fibre.
      - martinald 5y ago
        But noone went the fibre route in 1990. To my knowledge only widespread FTTH happened in the early 2000s, at which point there was affordable PON equipment. My point is that how you'd plan a FTTH network in 1990 would be radically different to how you would do it even 10 years later. There is a chance that you could have planned it entirely wrong given the changes in technology which came about rapidly after that.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Also keep in mind that any 1980s fibre network would have been totally antiquated now. G.652 was developed in 1984 and is still in use today (with newer revisions improving performance): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.652 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.652 * https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.652 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.652 * https://community.fs.com/blog/single-mode-fiber-comparison-g-652-vs-g-655.html https://community.fs.com/blog/single-mode-fiber-comparison-g... There's no reason why the fibre couldn't continue to be used today with updated equipment on both ends. Further even if it would be antiquated today, it would still have given many decades' worth of value, and we'd be replacing it with new fibre—as opposed to the lacklustre, half-hearted FTTN and other non-sense that seems to be going on today.
  - martinald 5y ago
    I don't mean the physical fibre. I mean the network layout. Common layout today is (X)GPON with a splitter with 32 nodes off it. I imagine a 1980s network would be much closer to a DOCSIS style RFoG layout, but with far less node density than cable because of the much better reach of fibre. You'd probably have (tens?) of thousands of homes connected to one segment - primarily for TV. This would have completely collapsed in the 2000s as bandwidth use exploded, and would have required enormous work to split it into smaller higher capacity networks (this is exactly what happened with coax cable internet).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kingcharles 5y ago
Outside of the JA.NET educational backbone, I'm not sure there really was any Internet to speak of in the UK in 1990. When I got on in '93/94 there was only a few hundred of us that I was aware of.
mc4ndr3 5y ago
What part of gutting a successful domestic program so that foreign investors get their pint of blood represents bias? I'm not even British.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
The UK realized computers were significant and developed a massive education programme with its own computer (the BBC Micro). By 1986, the BBC Micro's successor has an 8MHz ARM (yes that ARM) CPU. Who knows where we would have been if we'd had cheap fiber, rather than acoustic couplers. Fortunately I went to college. So I got to play with http in 1993 at Cambridge. Then myself, and every other nerd I know, fucked off to the USA. Not fiber, but at least we had internet at the office. I bought my first domain in '95 and put a stupid website on it. >Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant Yeah, you're right. Best to wait until it is significant before paying any attention to it. Wouldn't want to go starting an online book store or search engine in the '90s. The fact is, the UK did know computers and networking were significant. But that evil psychopath Thatcher didn't care.
dangerface 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 Sure the internet was nothing in the 90s but the telephone was huge, it was vital to business in the 80s and its popularity was only growing in the 90s. With hindsight we know that investing in the telephone would have been a bad call as it turned out to not be that important, but at the time they didn't know that they thought the telephone and its network was vital to business. It was THE technology of its time, it was the future of technology, it was the most obvious technology to invest in at the time. The issue is not that they didn't realise how vital the network was they knew exactly how vital it was at the time, but instead of investing in the future of said network Thatcher knowingly sacrificed that future to protect shareholders profits. Lets not use hindsight to blind us from the truth of the time so we can excuse poor decisions.

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.
- martinald 5y ago
  But assuming it wasn't a PON back then and was direct fibre to each house, the cost of the CPE would have been absolutely enormous back in the 90s and 2000s. The copper network would have been ripped out. Instead of ADSL in the early 2000s (which was "fine") you'd have had catastrophically expensive active fibre equipment which would have made broadband completely unaffordable for the masses. I can guarantee everyone would be saying what a complete mistake this white elephant fibre network was when ADSL would have been a fraction of the price. If you'd had a PON network there is no way that they would have planned the network in the 80s like you do now for FTTH. The segments would have been enormous and completely overcontended in the 2000s bandwidth boom. It would have required extremely expensive network reconfiguration to split the PONs down - the fibres would be going to the wrong place.
  - AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
    In the 80s maybe, in the 90s it was reasonably cheap to do 100Mbit over 40k fiber.
    - martinald 5y ago
      Was there any large scale consumer FTTH in the 90s (or even early 2000s)? I am sure the nordics had some very fast speeds but it was typically FTTB (fibre to an apartment block, then ethernet to each apartment).
  - dangerface 5y ago
    We know from countries that did go the fibre route that it actualy works out cheaper than trying to maintain a copper network as the copper you replace can be sold for almost as much as it costs to replace with fibre.
    - martinald 5y ago
      But noone went the fibre route in 1990. To my knowledge only widespread FTTH happened in the early 2000s, at which point there was affordable PON equipment. My point is that how you'd plan a FTTH network in 1990 would be radically different to how you would do it even 10 years later. There is a chance that you could have planned it entirely wrong given the changes in technology which came about rapidly after that.
throw0101a 5y ago
> Also keep in mind that any 1980s fibre network would have been totally antiquated now. G.652 was developed in 1984 and is still in use today (with newer revisions improving performance): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.652 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.652 * https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.652 https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.652 * https://community.fs.com/blog/single-mode-fiber-comparison-g-652-vs-g-655.html https://community.fs.com/blog/single-mode-fiber-comparison-g... There's no reason why the fibre couldn't continue to be used today with updated equipment on both ends. Further even if it would be antiquated today, it would still have given many decades' worth of value, and we'd be replacing it with new fibre—as opposed to the lacklustre, half-hearted FTTN and other non-sense that seems to be going on today.
- martinald 5y ago
  I don't mean the physical fibre. I mean the network layout. Common layout today is (X)GPON with a splitter with 32 nodes off it. I imagine a 1980s network would be much closer to a DOCSIS style RFoG layout, but with far less node density than cable because of the much better reach of fibre. You'd probably have (tens?) of thousands of homes connected to one segment - primarily for TV. This would have completely collapsed in the 2000s as bandwidth use exploded, and would have required enormous work to split it into smaller higher capacity networks (this is exactly what happened with coax cable internet).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kingcharles 5y ago

Outside of the JA.NET educational backbone, I'm not sure there really was any Internet to speak of in the UK in 1990. When I got on in '93/94 there was only a few hundred of us that I was aware of.

mc4ndr3 5y ago

What part of gutting a successful domestic program so that foreign investors get their pint of blood represents bias? I'm not even British.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

The UK realized computers were significant and developed a massive education programme with its own computer (the BBC Micro). By 1986, the BBC Micro's successor has an 8MHz ARM (yes that ARM) CPU. Who knows where we would have been if we'd had cheap fiber, rather than acoustic couplers. Fortunately I went to college. So I got to play with http in 1993 at Cambridge. Then myself, and every other nerd I know, fucked off to the USA. Not fiber, but at least we had internet at the office. I bought my first domain in '95 and put a stupid website on it. >Back in 1990 the internet wasn't significant Yeah, you're right. Best to wait until it is significant before paying any attention to it. Wouldn't want to go starting an online book store or search engine in the '90s. The fact is, the UK did know computers and networking were significant. But that evil psychopath Thatcher didn't care.

dangerface 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 Sure the internet was nothing in the 90s but the telephone was huge, it was vital to business in the 80s and its popularity was only growing in the 90s. With hindsight we know that investing in the telephone would have been a bad call as it turned out to not be that important, but at the time they didn't know that they thought the telephone and its network was vital to business. It was THE technology of its time, it was the future of technology, it was the most obvious technology to invest in at the time. The issue is not that they didn't realise how vital the network was they knew exactly how vital it was at the time, but instead of investing in the future of said network Thatcher knowingly sacrificed that future to protect shareholders profits. Lets not use hindsight to blind us from the truth of the time so we can excuse poor decisions.