[HN Gopher] Thatcher killed the UK's superfast broadband before ...
___________________________________________________________________
Thatcher killed the UK's superfast broadband before it even existed
Author : car_analogy
Score : 170 points
Date : 2022-04-21 19:09 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (webreturn.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (webreturn.co.uk)
| Havoc wrote:
| It is getting better. Recently got a flier that says 3gbps fibre
| is coming to my hood. (vs current 1gbps FTTB)
|
| That is in London though - probably not where the problems are on
| a national scale
| odiroot wrote:
| Southern England is also doing quite well, with multiple
| competing FTTx operators. But it highly depends where you live
| (dense centre vs residential districts).
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| I've had some problems in London where blocks of flats weren't
| kitted out properly. I believe that's why Hyperoptic started.
| exikyut wrote:
| Coool. That means you can ask for a quote for 1.25Gbps which
| they'll likely have to deliver using 10Gig equipment at both
| ends and then *synthetically* cap, which will likely have
| appreciably lower overhead than running 1 gig through 1 gig
| PHYs :D
| gambiting wrote:
| In my area OpenReach is planning to roll out their ultrafast
| fibre "by 2026". Not great. Couple miles out of Newcastle so
| not exactly middle of nowhere either.
| mnd999 wrote:
| The situation in the UK is shockingly bad. Openreach need to
| pull their finger out.
| philjohn wrote:
| It's patchy - I've got FTTP in Warwickshire, and also have
| the option of Virgin Cable (I'd rather not).
|
| But yes, if an area is in a "not spot" you're stuffed -
| which is why things like B4RN took off.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I live in the absolute arse end of nowhere Portugal - the
| nearest city is 60km away, over mountains, and the entire
| district (~50x50km) has a population of 3000.
|
| They have symmetric gigabit fibre in all of the villages, for
| EUR20 a month.
|
| In my apartment in the U.K., in a city of 300,000, the best I
| can get is 0.25/15Mbps - for PS80 a month. It craps out
| completely every evening, down to 200kbps or so, as everyone
| streams netflix at potato quality.
| bfz wrote:
| > They have symmetric gigabit fibre in all of the villages,
| for EUR20 a month.
|
| I often wonder at observations like this whether it's the
| result of massive subsidies or massive over-subscription of
| the infrastructure. How is actual bandwidth/jitter on that
| line? Romania also has bold claims about infrastructure
| penetration, it's a fair example of somewhere I'd have good
| reason to doubt their credibility.
|
| A stable loss/jitter-free FTTP connection at 50 GBP/mo. is
| very much value for money compared to an equivalent line
| featuring loss/latency/jitter at even a tenth of that price
| and with 10x the claimed line rate.
|
| Separately, I have put off gigabit installation numerous
| times over 6 years simply because I can't really benefit from
| it on contemporary WiFi.
|
| (Also yes, on re-reading my comment I realize I am a bit
| jealous of your setup in Portugal ;)
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yeah, it was heavily subsidised - they've been on a big
| push over the last several years to get digital
| infrastructure into the boondocks. Contention is low, given
| the population - and I don't directly use it, as I live
| quite a way off grid - but it's the backbone for our LTE
| connection, which gets a comfortable and consistent 150
| down and 50 up - plenty good enough.
| Havoc wrote:
| >whether it's the result of massive subsidies
|
| I think the key thing here is that probably yes, however it
| is essentially once off. Not that expensive to keep
| shooting photons down the fibre once its in the ground.
|
| So from a country perspective that's a pretty grand deal
| compared to say farming subsidies that you need to do
| annually.
| philjohn wrote:
| Having worked with a remote dev team in Romania it was
| actually pretty solid. Fast to services locally peered,
| slower to elsewhere, but still miles better than what I had
| in the UK at the time.
|
| And for telecommunications, which are definitely in the
| "utility" category now, subsidies for the up-front capital
| costs are warranted IMHO, especially as it can act as an
| economic accelerator.
|
| As for contemporary wifi, that's why I had my house wired
| for Cat 6 a few months back - I've got 3 Wifi 6 access
| points as well (PoE powered, ceiling mounted) and can
| saturate my 500/70 FTTP connection.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| In Romania you can get for 3EUR a month and you have overpaid
| then. I think it's no wonder why so many bright tech talent
| comes from the Cental Eastern European region. Accessible
| fast connections must have played a huge role.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Around me in south devon we got fairly fast broadband actually
| pretty quickly (faster than my family who lived in the prime
| ministers constituency at the time), but then the progress
| (certainly for the same price) basically just stopped.
|
| Luckily there are a few new ISPs popping up now.
| poooogles wrote:
| I lived on Dartmoor last year. I can testify that the
| broadband rollout stopped. We managed to get 5mb which wasn't
| so bad, the real problem was the connection would drop 2/3
| times an hour. Fine for casual use but terrible for remote
| work.
|
| The house we stayed in is now in the starlink queue.
| multjoy wrote:
| We're stuck on 18/1mbs up in the rural north (and that's
| with AAISP, so we're getting the most the line can
| provide), B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North - which would
| have been 1gbs fibre) has stalled because of Politics.
|
| I've just stuck an external antenna up and we're getting a
| decent 4G signal from EE so that will have to do for the
| time being. It's peaking at 50mbs with a bit higher
| latency, but the upload is 25x faster than the landline
| which does make for far more responsive usage.
|
| Annoyingly, there's a full Fibrus fibre rollout about 10
| miles south, but apparently there's no money in running a
| line up the main trunk road between the two major
| population centres for this area.
| aidos wrote:
| AAISP will also do line bonding, but you'll obviously be
| paying more and I'd imagine it's not going to be that
| much better.
|
| I switched over to their FTTP offering recently and,
| while it's not super fast compared to what others are
| claiming, having a router with a weird intermittent
| hardware issue reminded me of how good it is to be able
| to immediately jump on a call with technical people who
| actually care.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| it would have ended up dead fiber, like so many failed fiber
| rollouts from the era of "smart cable"
|
| most people don't realize that there is dead fiber all over San
| Jose CA (it literally stubbed up out of the ground near the
| utility box of a house I used to own there, so its not up for
| debate)...part of a failed pilot project from the cable provider.
| probably severed or degraded in twenty different mystery places
| by now so no one will ever bother trying to do anything with it
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| (2017)
|
| > IBM's Watson, the learning super-computer that functions
| through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical
| diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth,
| according to Dr Cochrane.
|
| Mmmmm, I don't think that's why it will fail.
| gumby wrote:
| Brings to mind Thatcher's famous statement: "There's no such
| thing as bandwidth."
| MrRadar wrote:
| Let me tell you a story about the long-term value of fiber. I
| live in an area where the incumbent teleco is CenturyLink, though
| it was originally AT&T (pre-breakup) and then USWest (post-
| breakup) then Qwest (after a merger with a telecommunications
| spinoff of Southern Pacific Railroad). In the mid-00s Qwest's
| management realized that copper cables were a dead-end technology
| so they began rolling out Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN) with VDSL
| service across their network. This allowed them to offer speeds
| of up to 140 Mbps on their legacy copper network and lay the
| seeds for an eventual Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) rollout.
|
| In the middle of this rollout they got bought out by CenturyLink,
| one of the biggest telcos not descended from AT&T at the time.
| CenturyLink's management did not invest in rolling out fiber (I
| guess this is where they got the buyout money from) and basically
| froze the rollout of new fiber for 10 years after the merger.
| Fast forward to last year and CenturyLink announced they were
| selling off half their customers to a private equity firm.
| Coincidentally, the half of the customers they were selling off
| were primarily in the areas that CenturyLink owned before they
| merged with Qwest, and the areas they kept were mainly the ones
| where Qwest rolled out fiber. Apparently their customers on fiber
| were where all of their profits were coming from, while the
| customers stuck on their legacy copper network were extremely
| unprofitable to serve.
|
| I'm lucky enough to be in an area where they offer gigabit fiber
| (from which I can get 800-900 Mbps down and pretty much exactly
| 940 up) but I feel very sorry for the customers on their legacy
| copper network as I can't imagine a private equity firm will be
| any more willing to invest in upgrading them to fiber than
| CenturyLink were, and many of those customers are in remote
| locations where their only non-satellite Internet option is
| CenturyLink DSL.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Standard Tory. Sell off any national asset to the lowest bidder.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Don't forget you have to force government ownership of
| successful cooperative businesses first!
| nostromo wrote:
| The article is reposting of an old article whose sole source is a
| single person, Peter Cochrane. This same person is presenting a
| narrative where he was right about everything, but was ignored by
| politicians. He's now a consultant.
|
| No corroboration from other sources or evidence is presented...
| It all just seems extremely self-serving. It's basically, "I was
| right about everything in 1979! Here is an alternate history
| where everyone listened to me and today things would be great."
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| ADSL2+ was widely available from the mid-2000s onward. I remember
| having an ADSL connection from the now-defunct 'Be' broadband
| provider (delivered over BT / Openreach copper).
|
| It was rated as 'up to' 24Mbit/s down and I got sustained
| download rates of 17Mbit/s.
|
| Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) was great for broadband options.
| smilespray wrote:
| For me, LLU only meant choosing which company logo was on top
| of the invoice for the same, crappy ADSL service in central
| London.
|
| Moved away in '13, hope things have improved.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| You can think of the internet connection consisting of two
| parts:
|
| 1. The copper from your home to the exchange.
|
| 2. Everything from the exchange to the rest of the internet.
|
| LLU meant that we had options for #2. Not all providers were
| the same. Some had better networks, better peering with other
| networks etc. than others. Or they had more infrastructure
| per customer.
|
| However, #1 was also a bottleneck. Where I live (in San
| Francisco) all the available copper pairs are in such a state
| that ADSL will only get me something like 3MBit/s at the best
| of times. And there's no way to get that copper upgraded. So
| whether I order ADSL from AT&T or Sonic, the connection will
| be bad.*
|
| Perhaps your situation was similar?
|
| * Thankfully both Monkey Brains and Xfinity have good service
| at the same address.
| smilespray wrote:
| Yep, very similar. It was the same when I lived in LA in
| the early 2000s, but that was at the beginning of DSL
| rollout, so I'm going to cut Verizon et al a nanometre of
| slack.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 1. The copper from your home to the exchange.
|
| > 2. Everything from the exchange to the rest of the
| internet.
|
| Also, 1A - the equipment at each end of the copper. The
| CLEC owned the CPE and the DSLAM, the only thing which is
| the same for any provider would be the copper itself.
|
| Source: Worked at a CLEC for more than a decade.
| philjohn wrote:
| LLU, and now the successor to it with FTTX where OpenReach
| manages the last mile and has a capped fee they can charge
| ISP's has done wonders for competition in the broadband space.
|
| You have "pack em in and sell it cheap" providers like PlusNet,
| super techy focussed providers like AAISP (and to a lesser
| extend Zen) and those in the middle.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| > AAISP
|
| I used Andrew & Arnold for a while when they offered bonded
| ADSL, i.e. a single virtual internet connection carried over
| two pairs of copper. It was plenty for our office of 10-15
| people.
|
| ISTR having to use a PC as a router, with a special ADSL
| whose chipset was supported by some special 'bonded adsl'
| linux or *bsd distribution.
| doener wrote:
| Very much similar to Helmut Kohl in Germany:
| https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
| mrlonglong wrote:
| It's a great pity Thatcher chose to be cremated otherwise there'd
| be a huge queue the length of the UK lining up to take a leak on
| her grave.
| blibble wrote:
| ah yes, the "tolerant" left
| philjohn wrote:
| You might want to read up on some of the things she did
| whilst in power.
|
| Supported the Pinochet regime for starters, as well as the
| behind the scenes behaviour in the miners strike. Right to
| buy leading to a shortage of council houses which persists to
| this day, etc. etc.
|
| But no, people saying mean things is the REAL problem.
| blibble wrote:
| > You might want to read up on some of the things she did
| whilst in power.
|
| I know what she did
|
| compared to say, Tony Blair, in terms of foreign policy she
| was a saint
|
| > But no, people saying mean things is the REAL problem.
|
| nice straw man
|
| > Right to buy leading to a shortage of council houses
| which persists to this day, etc. etc.
|
| it's not as if we've had 10 or so subsequent governments
| that could have abolished right to buy, is it?
|
| quite why some adult's behaviour becomes worse than average
| 12 year old playing xbox every time Margaret Thatcher is
| mentioned I really don't understand
|
| (I know why really... it's the the ultimate virtue signal
| for the tolerant left)
| philjohn wrote:
| Abolishing right to buy once it had happened was bolting
| the stable door after the horse had bolted. The council
| housing stock was already gone.
|
| And we're not talking about her foreign policy per se
| (Pinochet excluded) but the toll she, and the party,
| inflicted on a large proportion of the population.
|
| LGBTQ+ people in particular were affected by Section 28.
|
| But no, you've glibly responded to what is obviously a
| retelling of an OLD joke to paint anyone left of her as
| evil, adding nothing at all to the conversation other
| than more political point scoring.
| blibble wrote:
| > Abolishing right to buy once it had happened was
| bolting the stable door after the horse had bolted. The
| council housing stock was already gone.
|
| the next 32 years of governments were more than capable
| of building more
|
| they fact they didn't... is Thatcher's fault?
|
| > And we're not talking about her foreign policy per se
| (Pinochet excluded)
|
| you brought it up
|
| > LGBTQ+ people in particular were affected by Section
| 28.
|
| yes, agreed
|
| > But no, you've glibly responded to what is obviously a
| retelling of an OLD joke to paint anyone left of her as
| evil, adding nothing at all to the conversation other
| than more political point scoring.
|
| the sad part is it's not a joke
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| She's hated by certain segments of the UK population -
| particularly the media class - but that does not seem to
| translate broadly:
|
| - She won three general elections, the last two of which were
| landslides
|
| - She was the longest serving prime minister of the 20th
| century
|
| - In 2008 a BBC poll for favourite post WW2 prime minister put
| her at number 1
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The 1983 election saw a 1.5% swing of the vote _away_ from
| the Conservative party; the Conservatives gained 58 seats
| largely due to the splitting of the vote between the Labour
| and Alliance parties - taking 61% of the seats with only
| about 42% of the vote. The 1987 election was along the same
| lines.
|
| That these victories were landslides says more about the
| vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system than it
| does about the popularity of the Conservative party from
| 1979-1987.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| She was why so many of us can't afford to buy a house on what
| we earn. This is where the anger comes from. And currently
| we're very angry with the Tories over many things, energy
| costs, cost of living and the outbreak of Pinocchio's disease
| at Number 10.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Labour also helped make housing unaffordable the average
| cost tripling under their watch. While they were in power I
| saw my ability to buy a house erode, outstripping my
| ability to borrow on my salary, even as a fresh graduate.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Frankie Boyle on the subject: "Three Million for the funeral of
| Margaret Thatcher? For 3 Million you could give everyone in
| Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could
| hand her over to Satan in person."
| blibble wrote:
| I think at the point you're quoting Frankie Boyle you've
| already lost the argument
| smilespray wrote:
| Frankie Boyle on Thatcher's funeral procession: "She hasn't
| brought central London to a standstill like this since the
| Poll Tax riots."
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| The problem with pissing on Thatcher's grave is eventually you
| run out of piss.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Hence the queue. By the time you need to go again ...
| Twirrim wrote:
| 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?
| martinald wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-G.652
|
| * 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 wrote:
| 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).
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Oleg Gordieskey
| makomk wrote:
| Some of BT's early fibre rollouts were... interesting. In
| particular, there were various unlucky people who ended up not
| being able to get broadband at all because they were on BT fibre
| - as in, not even 512kbps ADSL, just nothing. That's because BT
| rolled out an ancient ancestor of current fibre technology called
| TPON that worked almost the same way as current fibre-to-the-home
| but was literally telephony only. They eventually ended up
| replacing a bunch of this with new copper runs just so they could
| offer basic ADSL.
| odiroot wrote:
| I currently live in England, in a (city) area, where it's
| pretty much impossible to get ADSL. Openreach doesn't go that
| far. I assume it used to be a TPON zone.
|
| Fortunately, there's a new separate, private operator FTTC
| network but it requires laying copper under our pavements and
| gardens for the last 10 or so meters. This also means
| absolutely no competition -- I either go with this company or I
| can forget about cable Internet.
| martinald wrote:
| Not sure you've got this right? There are no private FTTC
| networks in the UK. They all use openreach.
|
| There are many private FTTH networks, but they'd be laying
| fibre not copper.
|
| Also if you are in a city, you surely will have many good 5G
| options. You can get unlimited 5G broadband for PS20-60/month
| depending on operator. Speeds are generally very good.
| some-human wrote:
| Virgin Media does not use Openreach, and they lay FTTC and
| then uses multi-core copper (coax) from the cabinet to the
| home. Although they're the only FTTC that roll their own as
| far as I know. The other non openreach are Hyperoptic and
| Gigaclear and they provide FTTH.
| martinald wrote:
| Ok, correct, I was thinking of FTTC as in VDSL. I haven't
| heard of VM being "FTTC" before. Though even most of VMs
| new rollout is actually FTTH, albeit RFoG (for now).
| odiroot wrote:
| Bingo! I didn't want to name them, to give them free
| publicity.
| waxyalan wrote:
| Hull doesn't use Openreach all the cabinets are private
| KCOM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group
| martinald wrote:
| Ok, fine apart from Hull then.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I've never heard this part either:
|
| "What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened
| in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the
| world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up
| AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point,
| political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of
| optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the
| rest of the countries just followed like sheep."
| slyall wrote:
| Not strictly accurate. Plenty of countries where the Telco
| monopoly didn't get broken up (NZ and Australia specifically)
| and those monopolies were in no hurry to spend billions rolling
| out home fibre.
| veb wrote:
| at least we have super good fibre now. I'm on a 2GBps plan! I
| hear Chorus is even testing 10Gbps... If I'm honest,
| hyperfibre isn't really that much more useful than just
| normal 1Gbps.
|
| what NZ did well with their fibre roll out was connecting up
| all the smaller rural towns (in otago/southland anyway) :D
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Once we got a quote for getting fibre at an address that is
| about 500 meters away from the Googleplex in Mountain View.
| Ultimately it was more cost effective to set up a FedEx
| schedule to mail SSD's across the globe.
| 30944836 wrote:
| Your quote might have been "fake" and intended to convince
| you that they offer fiber to your address when they actually
| don't. I went through this with Comcast in San Jose.
| Requested the service, weeks of run arounds and "we lost your
| ticket I'll make a new one" followed by increasingly
| ludicrous quotes starting at $500 and then going up to
| $20000(!). All when the map on their site showed a trunk in
| my neighborhood. Eventually I started playing along just for
| a laugh, until they finally fessed up and said they don't
| offer fiber in my neighborhood at all.
|
| Some sort of fraud? I dunno.
| bombcar wrote:
| The telcos do all sorts of funny business and it can take
| them months to figure out if they can offer service to a
| particular building. Sometimes they need to send out people
| to actually poke around, sometimes they have to see if
| anyone else has access, etc.
|
| If you're a big enough building or throw money at it, they
| can usually figure out a way to make it work - but it's
| unlikely to be something an individual wants to spend.
| tialaramex wrote:
| This 2017 article, as is usual for the genre, makes several
| predictions that, even this short time later, are hilariously
| wrong.
|
| > IBM's Watson, the learning super-computer that functions
| through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical
| diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth
|
| Not actually very useful? Few commercial applications? Massively
| over-hyped? No, the problem was, according to this article, "lack
| of bandwidth". Huh.
|
| > It's going to change everything, from investment banking to the
| legal industry. That sort of service, being able to get remote
| diagnostics, can only occur if you've got bandwidth.
|
| This sounds like something where you'd really be missing out.
| Maybe some Korean readers can chime in about the amazing remote
| diagnostics they have there now thanks to the universal free
| symmetric Internet access and IBM Watson?
|
| > The UK will be frozen out of cloud computing because we don't
| have bandwidth
|
| The biggest cloud providers are US companies, but they have UK
| data centres as you'd expect. Most people I know use some cloud
| services (especially cloud data storage) and "we don't have
| bandwidth" doesn't tend to show up as a problem beyond, as in
| this article, people who just won't pay to go any faster...
|
| ... and that's the important twist in this.
|
| Providers will charge you more for the better service, and some
| people expected that to be free _even though providing it costs
| more_. The vast majority of the UK (more than 97% of UK
| households) could get >30Mbps Internet. But that would cost
| money, and many of them would rather not. This wasn't done by
| Margaret Thatcher (unless you have it in your head that a famous
| Capitalist suddenly wanted to give away a valuable service free)
| it's our friend the Free Market.
|
| You can buy 1Gbps symmetric in my street (and most of the city).
| Few people do, most of the people I know who've bought that
| service did so because the 40Mbps or 80Mbps vDSL they were used
| to isn't available at a new property they bought. Obviously
| Internet is a must-have, so the 1Gbps symmetric fixes that, but
| if the offer had been 100Mbps symmetric they'd have cheerfully
| paid the same price, which gets to my main thrust in all these
| discussions:
|
| Always On is what matters. The most important quality of life
| change for me was getting Always On, _not_ getting broadband
| Internet. For most people who experienced the upgrade they were
| simultaneous but I lived with Always On at 56kbps for many years
| so I know what mattered. From about 1996 I lived in a house with
| _shared_ 56kbps Always On. Obviously we didn 't video conference
| at that bandwidth, but most of daily life was the same as now.
| Got a question? Web search. After not very long that means
| Google. Downloads take a little longer, you watch TV still
| instead of Youtube or Netflix, but mostly it's the same. I would
| check my work in after a day or evening writing C, to a CVS
| server because even Subversion didn't exist yet.
|
| In about 2000 we got DSL at 512kbps and that was nicer, but the
| basic shape of life did not change. Whereas in households where
| DSL was their first taste of Always On it made a huge difference
| and too many of them mistook that for a difference caused by
| _bandwidth_ which it isn 't.
| simlan wrote:
| I must agree. Above 10Mbps quite honestly even in the current
| time and age it does not make a difference for my use cases. As
| long as it is consistent it does not change my life if it where
| 200Mbps or 1Gbps. We currently have 50 Mbps down which is very
| consistent and even during Corona has not failed more than once
| a month for a couple minutes. All that at a rate of sub 30EUR.
|
| Comparing that to the fiber offerings starting at 80EUR and up
| i do not see the use case right now.
|
| Does it make sense to deploy fiber in new construction and when
| upgrades are due anyway... Of course! But blaming governments
| to not magically forseeing which standard of technology would
| have great utility in a technology coming to life later is
| ludicrous.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| What's interesting about this article is that it lays the blame
| with anti-Trust actions.
|
| The article argues that BT and AT&T if they were allowed to keep
| their monopolies would have allowed the UK and US to have far
| greater internet speeds via massive fiber deployments.
|
| I have always seen monopolies as harming consumers and more
| competition as being beneficial, but this is an interesting
| observation.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| s/interesting observation/unsubstantiated claim about a
| counterfactual/
| projektfu wrote:
| Monopolies have the option of using their excess profit to
| enrich a few people at the expense of the customer. But it is
| not a requirement and that is also a good way to have the
| monopoly destroyed. Another option is to use the market power
| paternalistically, giving people services they didn't know they
| needed, planning for the future, performing basic research and
| R&D outside their current scope. Arguably there was a time when
| AT&T and its subsidiaries Western Electric and Bell Labs were
| doing this sort of thing. But they were also charging people an
| arm and a leg to rent a durable but low-functionality handset
| and preventing third party devices from connecting directly to
| the lines.
| pstrateman wrote:
| They monopolies were never broken up, just made local.
|
| It's extremely rare to have more than one choice for cable or
| copper phone service in the US.
| makomk wrote:
| It looks like there's some more contemporary context here:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817403-300-technolo...
|
| Basically, in order to take full advantage of this system every
| house would need their own ONT to convert the fibre optic into
| something useable. This would be very expensive with 1990s
| tech, and internet access wasn't a selling point back then
| (even the BBC didn't have a proper internet presence until like
| 1994) so the way they hoped to make that money back was by
| bundling in premium TV channels - leveraging their existing
| telecoms monopoly into becoming a US-style cable TV provider
| except over fibre. Like, I've found a paper from the BT
| Research Laboratories about it and it has a lot of stuff about
| "broadband signals", but what they mostly mean by that in the
| short term is analogue TV (which is indeed broadband by the
| 1990-era usage of the term). This was not popular with the
| government, who'd prefer to break that monopoly instead due to
| them doing such a poor job of basic things like actually
| connecting people to to the telephone network in a timely
| fashion.
|
| All the wider-scale rollouts I'm aware of used the cheaper
| Street TPON option mentioned in the article, where the ONT is
| in the street and shared between multiple customers, who only
| get traditional copper POTS service from it - and I mean that's
| literally all it can support. Telecom-grade audio at presumably
| the usual 8-bits, 8ksps, u-law. No ADSL, no ISDN, no digital
| data on the customer end of any kind, just POTS only with no
| direct upgrade path to anything else. Some of these continued
| operating and being a millstone around the neck of their
| customers until well into the 21st century, in fact it's
| possible some are still in use now.
| sofixa wrote:
| > I have always seen monopolies as harming consumers and more
| competition as being beneficial, but this is an interesting
| observation.
|
| They mostly do, and infrastructure tends to converge to natural
| monopolies. The trick is to regulate the hell out of them. For
| instance in France the former government owned telephony
| monopoly was forced to provide access to competitors to their
| physical network, at regulated prices. And to follow up on
| that, today an ISP can create new lines to link a new city or
| neighborhood, and they have exclusivity for a fixed period of
| time - afterwards they're forced to provide regulated access to
| their competitors. As a result, we have a healthy competition
| with good prices (usually between 30-50 euros depending on
| package, max speed, TV options) and good speeds ( multi-hundred
| Mbit, up to 1Gbit is the norm in most places - there are even
| villages with hundreds of inhabitants with fiber deployed
| everywhere, and proud signs "Commune fibree" on entering them).
| imtringued wrote:
| Wow, time limited monopolies! How did they come up with that
| idea! We should implement this for copyright and patents. Oh
| wait, patents already work the way they should. It's
| copyright that is broken...
| MichaelIt wrote:
| The article isn't just revisionist history, it is pure fantasy.
|
| Fiber technology was prohibitively expensive in the 70's and
| was far from ready to be used in residential homes. You would
| have to wait until the mid-90's for the "killer app" (the world
| wide web).
| tyrfing wrote:
| If you're interested in thinking more about it, Peter Thiel's
| _Zero to One_ is a very interesting book. It 's certainly not
| necessarily true that a monopoly ends up providing value like
| that, but with Google as an example, it's very unlikely they
| would provide so much open source code if they were in a
| vicious fight for survival.
|
| > [T]he history of progress is a history of better monopoly
| businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress
| because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly
| profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then
| monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to
| make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research
| projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
| nemothekid wrote:
| It's not a good counter-argument because telecoms arguably
| have a monopoly power in the US and were dragging their feet
| in offering fiber up until Google announced they were
| becoming an ISP.
| tyrfing wrote:
| > telecoms arguably have a monopoly power in the US and
| were dragging their feet in offering fiber up until Google
| announced they were becoming an ISP.
|
| One of those is extracting monopoly profits, and it's not
| the telecoms.
| smilespray wrote:
| I am staunchly against book burning on principles, but I
| suddenly find myself wondering whether Peter Thiel is
| flammable.
|
| Jokes aside, I'm not going to take anything that man says on
| face value -- even if I'm reading the article as I speak.
| munk-a wrote:
| Oh, monopolies definitely harm consumers - but even a wrong
| clock can be right twice a day.
|
| The US still has a plethora of local cable monopolies and we
| haven't seen incredible internet offerings come out of those.
| whatshisface wrote:
| A plethora of multiple local monopolies combines all of the
| internal service (accounting, legal, compliance) duplication
| and inefficient fixed-cost overheads of multi-seller markets
| with all of the seller-biased non-equilibrium pricing of
| giant monopolies. Somehow, we got the worst of all worlds.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I always thought the UK was pretty ahead in the early 2000s
| because we dug up all the streets to install cable and got
| reasonable speeds for the time that way. Virgin was like 10 quid
| a month back then IIRC. And that was pretty much nation wide but
| some odd places didn't get it.
| giobox wrote:
| This will _hugely_ vary based on where you were living at that
| time - I worked for a UK ISP in the early to late 2000s and can
| 't agree with this description of the UK as a whole.
|
| Virgin's coverage has never really been close to "nation wide"
| either. Even today, Virgin Media's DOCIS network only reaches
| about half the premises in the country. It was far less in the
| early 2000s! Virgin also only acquired the Telewest cable
| network in 2006 and didn't rebrand it Virgin Media till 2007.
| legitster wrote:
| The explanation provided is actually counter to one we are often
| told:
|
| > But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided
| that BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband
| was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and
| service that no other telecom company could do.
|
| > In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T.
| And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point,
| political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of
| optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the
| rest of the countries just followed like sheep.
|
| > This created a very stop-start roll-out which doesn't work with
| fibre optic - it needs to be done en masse. You needed economy of
| scale. You could not roll out fibre to the home for 1% of Europe
| and make it economic, you had to go whole hog.
|
| It probably didn't help that the companies in question all
| thought of the internet as a information medium (the next
| television or radio!) and not like a grid (a la a utility). So it
| wasn't clear that there is innately a natural monopoly.
| makomk wrote:
| For the most part, I don't think the companies in question were
| really thinking about the internet at all in this era. Typical
| intended services would be voice, analog cable TV and Videotex
| in the short term, with the intention to upgrade to digital
| cable and video on demand and eventually circuit-switched
| broadband ISDN that would allow you to effectively call up
| another computer and transfer data at relatively high speed.
| Remember, these are telephone companies - they were strongly
| biased towards thinking in telephone-centric metaphors and
| coming up with designs based on how the telephone network
| worked. There was a whole ecosystem of telecom-designed
| networking like ATM that was effectively rendered obsolete by
| the Internet and packet switching. (Even BT's internal systems
| and phone switching mostly run over their own slightly oddball
| version of IP-based networking these days.)
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| Another one of the many modern problems in the dysfunctional UK
| that can be traced back to Thatcher.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Surely they can be traced back to the mess of the 70's which
| Thatcher was very much a reaction to
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Kohl did the same in Germany by pushing copper cables instead of
| fibre in the 1980s since the former minister for post and
| telecommunication, Schwarz-Schilling, was the owner of a company
| manufacturing copper cable. Typical example for corrupt
| politicians of Kohl's CDU party.
|
| https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
| (in German)
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > Typical example for corrupt politicians of Kohl's CDU party.
|
| Schroder is SPD and he seems to be shoulders deep in Nord
| Stream controversy and Gazprom money. So it kind of looks like
| a German political class issue rather than a CDU issue.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| CDU/CSU politicians are at least caught more often than SPD-
| related politicians. But Schroder and also Scholz certainly
| also have some skeletons in the closet (and don't get me
| started on the FDP or AfD...).
|
| There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption
| affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsa
| ffaren_u...
| coob wrote:
| Scholz has also consistently lied about not blocking
| getting heavy weapons to Ukraine.
| WalterBright wrote:
| All politicians are corrupt like that. Another reason why
| socialism is inefficient and uncompetitive.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The problem with old fiber is that active networks are even
| more of a dead-end than copper. Active fiber networks leave you
| with whatever tech you buried and put up on every corner;
| upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line. It
| seems to me like in the 80s and 90s active networks were
| favored (see e.g. OPAL) - which would be far more useless today
| than copper, as copper's capabilities expanded hugely over time
| as more sophisticated modulation techniques became possible.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Copper is still trash though compared to passive fiber... and
| expensive to run. Loads of electricity and amps required to
| use it and a lot of fine tuning and interference management
| and maintenance.
|
| A ton of costly, endless work when you can bypass all of that
| by laying some passive fiber...
| quink wrote:
| > upgrading is basically as expensive as laying new line
|
| That assertion is highly dependent on too many factors and
| even recent developments to be of much use.
|
| That general assertion needs to be backed up with everything
| around the soil type, the copper diameter, labour costs,
| protocols and type of fibre, etc., etc.
|
| And if you're going down the route of having VDSL ISAMs in
| the field anyway then you're certainly going to have the
| infrastructure there already anyway to support GPON over
| whatever fibre is in the ground anyway.
|
| And are you sure that by "copper's capabilities" you're not
| actually referring to progressively closer deployment of
| infrastructure to the customer to overcome copper's
| limitations? Because the move from dial any number to the
| local exchange to a node (FTTN) to now the curb (FTTC)
| certainly seems to reflect that more adequately.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Are there more people available to work on one vs the
| other, or would you be trained to handle both?
| fweimer wrote:
| There were some fairly large fiber rollouts in the late
| 80s/early 90s (OPAL, Optische Anschlussleitung). No copper
| meant it was impossible to deploy DSL, and available optical
| networking technology wasn't cost-effective during the first
| years of DSL rollout. Rumor has it that the old OPAL
| infrastructure can be used for GPON today, but that became
| available only much later. For many years, your best hope as an
| OPAL customer was that the incumbent eventually deployed
| copper.
|
| I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would
| have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking
| equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the
| number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been
| larger.
|
| (The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV
| broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the
| copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)
| riedel wrote:
| Actually the cited article rather explains that the move to
| copper was also heavily motivated to support cable television
| which allowed to stream more right leaning media to households.
| In the end it is mostly about power not necessarily corruption.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's funny how openly corrupt German political party leaders
| always turn out to be, yet we still don't consider it to be a
| corrupt country.
| alex_young wrote:
| That was 40 years ago. Do you think they are still as
| corrupt?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Did you miss the last 40 years? Where's Gerhard Schroder
| work now?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Ahem. _Cum-Ex_
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Yes - and Covid even accelerated this by enabling shady
| deals for the delivery of overpriced masks by CDU/CSU
| politicians. There's even a Wikipedia article about this:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffare
| Matt3o12_ wrote:
| Yea there are many examples of high level corruption in the
| german government (and most western governments actually,
| including the US). A recent example is the mask scandal
| with CDU/CSU (same party) https://www.dw.com/en/german-
| mask-scandal-unforgivable-viola...
|
| You will not find much local corruption though, which is
| what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries.
| Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of
| stuff. I'm sure it also happens in Germany, but that is
| very very rare.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My experience, having German family: Germans in general
| are very much about propriety and doing things correctly
| and are often very harsh if you step outside this line.
|
| So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do
| the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some
| structural fashion tied to political parties, long term
| associations, business connections, etc. that have the
| appearance of being practical, official, and "right."
|
| A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a
| comment like this about western countries corruption vs
| "third world" or "second world" corruption:
|
| In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic,
| because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe
| some local official to make something go your way. It's
| not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible"
| if you have some spare cash.
|
| But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the
| connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a
| zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed,
| but if you're powerful enough you can control a political
| party and prevent it from investigating your company,
| have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from
| some raising some tax.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yeah, I tried to explain this to someone about Portugal
| too... they didn't get it. If the system is completely
| broken and going to kill you in a "non-corrupt" country,
| there's nothing you can do about it as someone who's not
| a megacapitalist.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Maybe a first step to discourage this would be to restrict
| the time the chancellor or any minister can be in office to
| two election periods (like the US president). Sixteen years
| of Kohl and Merkel governments, respectively, paralyzed the
| country and hindered progress especially in the digital
| sector.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Because the US government isn't captured by corporate
| interests? They rank significantly worse than Germany on
| the Global Corruption Index [1] and on the Corruption
| Perception Index [2]. In a global comparison both are
| great, but relative to each other the US really isn't an
| example Germany can look up to.
|
| The chance of a government staying in government for a long
| time also means that governments have to think long-term
| because they might still be in government when the
| consequences come around. In the US system the optimal
| strategy is to do things that look good in the short term
| but backfire as soon as your term limit expires. That way
| you look good, and the next president (who's with near
| certainty from the opposition party) looks bad.
|
| I'd be more in favor of passing an age limit, but I'm well
| aware that that has no chance of happening.
|
| 1: https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
|
| 2: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021
| guerrilla wrote:
| Or just ban public officials from holding stock and from
| taking on jobs at state clients...
| hetspookjee wrote:
| They'll find a way, of that you can be sure. I think
| restricting the term is the only way possible to limit
| corruption in that regard.
| prirun wrote:
| Lottery elections: put people in office like jury duty.
| You don't want to be President? Too bad! You're
| qualified, have a good background (whatever that is),
| people have vouched for your character, so ... you're it
| for 4 years!
|
| I'd trust my next door neighbor to be President more than
| someone who actually _wants_ to be President.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's still the same party in charge, it's not like much
| would change in that case. But yes, every bit helps.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Wasn? Bananen Republik Deutschland!
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| maybe because they get exposed, then fail re-election
| imtringued wrote:
| It's a corrupt country but its economy is big enough that it
| can shoulder a parasite or a dozen. Developing countries and
| eastern Europe does not have this luxury.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Hmm, that's plausible. I'd still like to see someone try to
| measure that though. Interesting thought.
|
| I'm not sure Germany isn't experiencing negative effects
| from this though. Like the Gazprom thing, for example, this
| broadband thing, maybe even the nuclear thing?
| lampenrad wrote:
| If Germany is a "corrupt country", than what's the rest of
| Europe?: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/koyyv5/eu
| ropean_pub...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Because corruption as an issue is overrated or wrongly
| defined. South Korea and Japan are mentioned in the article
| as exemplary countries when it comes to internet speed and
| infrastructure but both have virtually no dividing line
| between private conglomerates (Chaebol and Keiretsu
| respectively) and public administration. The same is true in
| Germany, but with few exceptions that kind of intersection
| doesn't matter because governance is by and large _effective_
| , which beats clean.
|
| In fact this kind of conglomeration between the public and
| private sector is why they get things done, compared to the
| vetocratic nature of other countries.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Both countries have reputations for terrible "big business
| style" corruption. And really good infrastructure.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| German corruption indirectly affects the stability of the
| European Union, as they with France are de-facto most
| important players now. In the "new EU" countries, whatever
| Germany does wrong or hypocritical will surely be
| weaponized by euro-skeptics.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's because they do even their corruption by the book, so it
| seems legit.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Germans are really good at Public Relations (PR) but people
| don't think they are, which helps them be good at PR.
| lampenrad wrote:
| That is not the case. Otherwise, with regards to the war in
| Ukraine, Germany wouldn't get this singled out when it
| comes to criticism.
|
| In fact, one of the biggest domestic criticisms of the
| government right now is their terrible communication
| strategy.
|
| English is the lingua franca and as such Anglo media has an
| incredible amount of power in shaping opinions in the West.
|
| And frankly, the reporting, particularly from Anglo and
| Eastern European media, has had a heavy anti-German bias
| for weeks now. (Up from the usual moderate bias)
| guerrilla wrote:
| I don't think this contradicts their point... Others can
| be more powerful, but most of the time those more
| powerful aren't attacking them. The rest of the time
| Germany's PR is good and working...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we still don 't consider it to be a corrupt country_
|
| It's by and large not, and to the degree it is, it's open and
| not insidious. The kind of corruption that kills economies is
| the insidious type. (And the stealy variety.)
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| I disagree, VW/Mercedes emissions scandals and Wirecard
| (particularly the behavior of BaFin, which was defending
| wirecard and harassing journalists for years) point to
| entrenched corruption.
|
| Nobody in government or industry has really been prosecuted
| for either (some Wirecard folks are on the run).
| ricardobayes wrote:
| "Honk if Thatcher's dead" relevant:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUlj48Rvp1c
| vermilingua wrote:
| The problem with pissing on Thatcher's grave is that you
| eventually run out of piss.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Immediately after that decision by Thatcher's government, the
| UK fell far behind in broadband speeds and, to this day, has
| never properly recovered._
|
| I'm not buying it. I mean, you can only blame what Thatcher did
| in 1990 for so long.
|
| There was nothing magic about the year 1990 that you had to have
| the fiber then, or else you irrecoverably missed the boat.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| I was on the dole during Thatcher. That fucking witch fucked up
| so much, i would find it difficult to ever forgive her, but
| more importantly (as in 'bigger than her') the people she
| empowered, that empowered others to fleece a once-great
| country, and dumb it down horribly. I'd never, ever, accuse her
| of messing up broadband though. Jesus, that's a real
| elastication of the truth.
| blibble wrote:
| the classic liberal in me (vs. modern "liberal") didn't like
| her authoritarianism
|
| but she saved the country by smashing the trade unions that
| were holding elected governments (both Labour and
| Conservative) and the rest of the country to ransom
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
|
| trade union domination over the government is now thankfully
| a thing of the past
| youngtaff wrote:
| Having been on the dole I can sympathise (was quite a few
| years after Thatcher though for me)
|
| I think the biggest problem with Thatcher is she recognised
| the old industries were dead but didn't do enough to replace
| them - Nissan Sunderland perhaps being one of her few
| successes on this front
|
| It also easy to forget that the closure of the mines is one
| of the reasons our CO2 emissions have gone down - mind the
| demise of UK coal was as much Scargill's doing and Thatchers
| jonatron wrote:
| I've noticed FTTP is now available to people served by wooden
| poles in my area. Metal poles or underground mean no FTTP. I
| guess attaching a box to a metal pole is an insurmountable
| engineering challenge in the UK. So some people have the choice
| between VDSL, FTTP, Cable, and others have only VDSL, or 5G I
| suppose.
| tebbers wrote:
| I have FTTP in London and that's how they're delivering it -
| there is an optical box on the telephone pole and my fibre line
| comes into my house literally alongside my telephone line. It
| just terminates at a slightly different location in my flat.
| odiroot wrote:
| I don't really understand the wooden poles. I thought it's a
| relict of the past but then again, I saw a new wooden pole
| being erected a few weeks ago, it had the junction box on top,
| I guess ready to provide the final legs to houses.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Metal poles? I've never seen a metal pole for phone lines.
| blibble wrote:
| I have Openreach FTTP and I live on a modern estate with
| ducting
|
| before the installation date I watched the guy push the fibre
| through the duct, popping out outside my external termination
| box
|
| then on the day the guy laid the internal fibre and spliced
| them together
| Teandw wrote:
| Attaching the box to a metal pole isn't the problem. There are
| other problems such as H&S, expected demand (as the boxes have
| limited amounts of ports) and pole capacity in general. Poles
| can only have a certain amount of wire loading.
|
| Those are not always straight forward things to consider when
| put all together and forward planning is also needed.
|
| This kind of goes into it:
| https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/openreach-upda...
| rogy wrote:
| Yep i live on a managed estate full of old people who've lived
| here since they were built, only get VDSL. Management comittee
| wouldn't even let Virgin install cable, so going to have to
| wait for them all to age out of the committee so we can get
| somewhere
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