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It has worked reasonably well in the UK. We had British Telecom which got split up into BT Openreach who own the network and BT for the consumer side then aroun
by deadbunny 4y ago
It has worked reasonably well in the UK. We had British Telecom which got split up into BT Openreach who own the network and BT for the consumer side then around 2000 IIRC they mandated that other Telcos/ISPs be allowed to use the network and now we have dozens of companies offering the same thing for varying prices.
IMO the main downside is that because Openreach own the network it means a lot of the country is stuck on ADSL with FTTC still being rolled out and FTTP mostly a pipedream due to decades of underfunding and where fibre is being rolled out it's because of Government spending rather than Openreach funding.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoAlso, the rollout of fibre in the 80s was intentionally stopped by Thatcher as it would make it hard for American owned companies to compete. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost... > Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia. > "Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.