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What's funny is that the UK could have been covered in fibre by the early 2000s. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race

What's funny is that the UK could have been covered in fibre by the early 2000s. 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... BT knew in the 70s that fibre would be the best way forward, spun up factories to manufacture it, made it cheaper to lay than copper at the time. By the start of the 90s they were ready to start rolling it out locally, presumably in a FTTP configuration since it was cheaper than copper. Thatcher didn't like that BT had a monopoly on the UK network, a monopoly she created by privatising them. So it was deemed anti-competitive for BT to roll out fibre nationwide, since she wanted to encourage private American companies to start building networks. Makes you wonder what our internet would be like today, perhaps as good as South Korea.

makomk 4y ago
Almost certainly not in an FTTP configuration. BT experimented with that but the problem was that the ONTs were too expensive at the time to install one in each house. The way that they originally hoped to pay for some of the costs was by running television over the fibre (not internet access - the proposals did have some space for data but it was tiny by modern standards), effectively leveraging their telephone monopoly to become a cable TV provider as well. That's where all the talk about competition and US cable companies comes in. Having found and read some of the reports Dr. Cochrane seems to be rewriting history a bit to fit modern partisan politics. In practice, BT did use something called TPON to run phone lines over fibre to some areas, but this was termiated in the street to analog-only narrowband over copper using hardware shared between multiple houses. This meant that people unfortunate enough to be in areas served by fibre often found they couldn't get anything faster than dialup well into the 21st century. In some cases BT actually ended up replacing this with plain copper runs back to the exchange so that customers could at least get ADSL.

makomk 4y ago

Almost certainly not in an FTTP configuration. BT experimented with that but the problem was that the ONTs were too expensive at the time to install one in each house. The way that they originally hoped to pay for some of the costs was by running television over the fibre (not internet access - the proposals did have some space for data but it was tiny by modern standards), effectively leveraging their telephone monopoly to become a cable TV provider as well. That's where all the talk about competition and US cable companies comes in. Having found and read some of the reports Dr. Cochrane seems to be rewriting history a bit to fit modern partisan politics. In practice, BT did use something called TPON to run phone lines over fibre to some areas, but this was termiated in the street to analog-only narrowband over copper using hardware shared between multiple houses. This meant that people unfortunate enough to be in areas served by fibre often found they couldn't get anything faster than dialup well into the 21st century. In some cases BT actually ended up replacing this with plain copper runs back to the exchange so that customers could at least get ADSL.