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Comment by guiriduro | Hacker News Reader

The greatness of British inventors is only exceeded by the small-mindedness, short-termism and self-sabotage of British investment and successive governments.

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Let's not forget that Britain could have had mega fast fibre broaband in the 1990s if Margaret Thatcher had allowed British Telecom to proceed instead of 'leaving it to the market to decide'.

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...

Plenty of similar stories in the US. In particular our Superconducting Super Collider which would have been around 3 times the energy of the LHC. We spent $2 Billion on it, dug 14 miles of tunnel, and then shut it all down and let it fill up with water. What a colossal waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

To be fair it was a bit early technology-wise and they would have had to rip the entire thing out and start again three times since. We did pretty good out of copper in the end.

The expensive bit of putting in a fibre network is the holes and ducts.

Once you've got that you can replace fibre relatively cheaply. Guess what, BT's labs were well there too. They also invented the tech for blown fibre installation before anyone else.

BT were the world leaders until the Torys thew that away, for who knows why.

IMHO twisted pair copper or coax is nothing more than a slow cludge compared to real fibre.

...and by market she really meant wholly foreign owned corporations in the form of NTL and Telewest. Personally I blame Norman Tebbit for screwing the pooch on that one.

Still it's not like the current bunch of "classics" graduates have any more forsight, sadly.

I would like to learn a bit more of the details of how this developed from start to finish. Were there any other bidders apart from NTL and Telewest? This must be a matter of public record somewhere.

That question sort of leaves out the option of not selling off public works in the first place.

Only in your head. What part of "start to finish" is ambiguous? Don't put words in my mouth.

Thank you pidg -- I would be posting this if you had not. Such an important and unfortunate blunder.

There are just so many projects that we've either canned or try to do on the cheap with disastrous results.

We're the only nation to develop launch capability not to use it, for example.

British soldiers had a barely functional, unreliable, rifle for years (the SA80) because the phrase "Buy cheap, buy twice" still hasn't entered the minds of own managing classes.

We are of course also running straight off a cliff soon, thanks to Brexit.

> British soldiers had a barely functional, unreliable, rifle for years (the SA80)

This is true, although the problems were all with the original A1 variant which, from everything I've read and watched, was absolutely an under-designed PoS. The subsequent A2 upgrade programme addressed these issues but it took about a decade longer than it should have done before it was implemented.

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