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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

UK enters the chat. We could have had the best broadband in the world, but Mrs Thatcher decided to cull fibre optic networks in favour of copper ones as in her mind BT would get competitive advantage over companies offering copper network. Absolute madness and seems like the motive of money changing hands under the table was never investigated.

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

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We're now in the position that just one company has a FTTP network. It's mad that Virgin Media has a monopoly on one cable that runs into my house, but all the other providers have to compete over the other cable that runs beside it (and I believe are unable to provide their own, even if they wanted to). I guess she got what she wanted.

"unable to provide their own" seems to me like it's not universally true across the UK, at least -- CityFibre are digging up the roads just along from my house right now, installing new fibre all the way along the road, presumably in preparation for being able to provide fibre directly to each house...

This is not true at all. The UK is seeing an explosion in non-BT FTTP networks - Hyperoptic, CommunityFibre, CityFibre, B4RN to name just a few off the top of my head. Granted, BT's network is probably currently the largest but that's because it's had a headstart and is a massive company - but they are certainly facing lots of competition at the local level which is great.

That's not true at all, OpenReach[1] is putting fiber to the door in all kinds of small villages and other rural environments. There are many other providers. I think Virgin Media got the edge because of an acquisition of TelNet (or named something like that?) which laid a bunch of the groundwork infrastructure for fiber in the 90s, mainly in cities.

1. https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband

Telewest?

NTL, just googled it. They merged with Telewest at some point

I missed the edit window. Thanks for the corrections (orf, tebbers, pm215).

I meant to say that we're effectively in a localised monopoly to whatever provider has decided to invest in covering our area. Are there really buildings with cables from multiple competing providers which would allow a genuine choice? And as an individual consumer, it isn't possible to commission your own infrastructure.

Funny,the same happend in Germany during the Helmut Kohl era.

https://www.epr-blog.de/2018/09/21/fiber-optics-is-the-futur...

I think UK still has it better fiber infra than Germany overall.

It's too reductive to blame this on one politician. We had a similar thing happen in Australia, and so did Germany, and countless other countries.

Infrastructure tradeoffs are made all the time - it just so happens that that one backfired due to a very sudden technological revolution predicted by almost no one at the time.

Thatcher was the prime minister, not "one politician"

>a very sudden technological revolution

Except in Germany's case it wasn't sudden. Kohl's Government was instructed by experts that copper will die and fiber is the future yet his cabinet knowingly shelved that idea so that his copper buddies could make a profit.

Whether good or bad, it wasn't a trade-off - it was an ideological decision. There's always a struggle between those that treat infrastructure as a national interest and those that want to privatise it

There is this incredible tale about how the UK was on the verge of getting a fiber optic (analog then!) television network, where they would have had a bunch of LaserDisc players, all playing various movies starting at staggered intervals, all streaming into the fiber optic network, so you could have had basically Netflix back in the 80s, by "tuning" in to the correct station.

Taking advantage of the immense bandwidth available in fiber. Alas, it would have been a monopolistic crime against Capitalism or something, so it never came to be.

With 80s tech, one could have easily created a set top box for browsing titles (in text format), possibly based on Ceefax technology. (Teletext in other parts of the world.)

I can't understand why they had this assumption that it will create a monopoly? At very least they could create a new state body in charge of the network and then lease parts to different companies. Kind of similar fashion how National Rail works, but being able to enable true competition as multiple companies could lease the same routes to customers.

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