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.