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Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? Also, we nearly had gigabit fibre to the home 40 years ago (before anything even needed to run at

Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? Also, we nearly had gigabit fibre to the home 40 years ago (before anything even needed to run at 1Gbit, or you could afford the transceivers, admittedly) because BT's vision for the future of telephony was to rip out all the copper and run fibre to every single house. Then the right-wing extremist Thatcher government got wind of the idea and decided that this was too big a monopoly to be allowed to stand, so they stole the entire public property that was BT, smashed it to bits, and sold it off to private industry. This put back everything by *decades*. Now it's a battle to work out wayleaves, interoperability, who's responsible for what physical plant, and all sorts of other messes. Thanks, Conservatives, fuck you very much.

coob 4y ago
> Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? No, because the law only affects England - Building Regs a devolved matter in Wales and Scotland. There is a separate law mentioned in the article which is telecoms related and not devolved in Wales - but that is about landlords not needing to grant access to engineers.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Ah, fair enough then.
OJFord 4y ago
> Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? I think it's correct actually, housing is devolved. 'The Building etc. (Amendment) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2022' - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/contents/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/contents/made - my emphasis.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Fair point, okay.
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
If you wanna hack into the verges servers and change the headline of the article go ahead...
makomk 4y ago
No, we didn't. I looked up the specs when the topic came up and I think the data part was something like 2Mbps shared by everyone. The big "broadband" content that BT were hoping would fund the whole thing was analog pay TV, basically leveraging their telephone monopoly into a cable TV monopoly as well. Without that extra shared pay TV money it wasn't feasible to install an individual optical network terminal in everyone's house with the tech back then, and that's the big monopoly Thatcher's government balked at. In the end they did end up using another version of the same tech in some areas which used shared optical terminals between multiple houses that was telephony only - and I mean literally telephony only. A bunch of people found out about their high tech fibre optic lines when they couldn't get anything faster than dialup internet whilst all the people with normal copper lines had ADSL.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  We'd still be using that fibre now with faster transceivers. That was the whole point.

coob 4y ago

> Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? No, because the law only affects England - Building Regs a devolved matter in Wales and Scotland. There is a separate law mentioned in the article which is telecoms related and not devolved in Wales - but that is about landlords not needing to grant access to engineers.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
Ah, fair enough then.

OJFord 4y ago

> Can we maybe edit the title to say "UK" instead of "England"? I think it's correct actually, housing is devolved. 'The Building etc. (Amendment) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2022' - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/contents/made https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/contents/made - my emphasis.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
Fair point, okay.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

If you wanna hack into the verges servers and change the headline of the article go ahead...

makomk 4y ago

No, we didn't. I looked up the specs when the topic came up and I think the data part was something like 2Mbps shared by everyone. The big "broadband" content that BT were hoping would fund the whole thing was analog pay TV, basically leveraging their telephone monopoly into a cable TV monopoly as well. Without that extra shared pay TV money it wasn't feasible to install an individual optical network terminal in everyone's house with the tech back then, and that's the big monopoly Thatcher's government balked at. In the end they did end up using another version of the same tech in some areas which used shared optical terminals between multiple houses that was telephony only - and I mean literally telephony only. A bunch of people found out about their high tech fibre optic lines when they couldn't get anything faster than dialup internet whilst all the people with normal copper lines had ADSL.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
We'd still be using that fibre now with faster transceivers. That was the whole point.