> he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications. The U

> he was prevented from extending his project outside the lab by pressure from the British Post Office, which then held a monopoly on telecommunications. The UK and telecoms don't make a happy pairing - we always seem to do the wrong thing: 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... Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future." He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward. "In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation. "In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".