Just to add a piece of data to support this:
> It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground
I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down!
> It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground
I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down!
(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)
Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc.
Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs.
However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset.
National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished.
As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
Not particularly true.
Go to a city in the world that REALLY has "never been planned", then come back and tell me London hasn't. ;)
Imagine living somewhere that people who work service or retail jobs (or nursing or teaching or all manner of underpaid but essential professions) can also afford to live!
It also means that local services can't be compartmentalised so that only rich people get decent services.
For example, southwark uses the same police force to cover the southbank (cultural centre) the £5m apartment blocks, as well as the shithole council estates (well they aren't shitholes anymore.)
TLDR: you don't get no-go areas.
I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on.
He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about.
"Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?"
"Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!"
"Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."
Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.
Sounds like they haven't changed !
I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development.
Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises.
If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users.
And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT.
So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got.
Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.
If Hyperoptic (or someone else like Community Fibre or The 4th Utility, etc) are in an area then OpenReach will put that area nearer to the bottom of their todo list.
It's better if they concentrate on putting fibre into areas that still have 7Mbps wet string DSL than competing in an area that already has one or more Gbps fibre options.
Even then, OpenReach tend to do FTTC first. Then it's case of what the last mile is formed of:
If it's via telephone poles then they get the fibre concentrators installed on the poles (which involves digging up the roads to get fibre to the poles) and then they're ready for the individual fibre runs to each property as and when they want to be connected.
You can see the differences in Google Streetview images in a residential road like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA where the the June 2024 images show the fibre concentrators at the top of the pole, and then going back to the 2015 images or before where they aren't present.
If the last mile is underground then the fibre concentrators have to be installed in the service ducts (it's easier for them to deploy fibre alongside their existing copper pairs) and the last 5-50 yards to the actual premises is an absolute lottery, especially as many house redevelopments bury existing underground cables under concrete and other structures and twist/kink things in a way that copper is fine to deal with but there's little chance you can run anything else through whatever conduit is there, let alone something without corners too tight for fibre.
Compare the above overhead wiring fun with a street such as: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86 where there are no telephone poles.
It was actually a worst case scenario, because FTTC often actually gives you a sub-optimal point to build out full fibre from, because you need way more cabinets to get decent copper speeds than you need optical splitters if you’re going to a passive optical network, so just building a decently optimised PON network is much cheaper than doing FTTC and then transferring to full fibre.
Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000.
AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps.
Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.
I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.
First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.
Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.
Reminds me of this infamous decade-old story:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161010203002/http://mybroadban...
Log your activity, or lack thereof, meticulously. Perhaps a critical part was back-ordered, or more expensive than expected, and note in the log how it still hasn't arrived so you still aren't able to operate. If complaints come in, get them to be maximally public about it, ideally in a town meeting or something, then whip out your logbook and coup-fourré. Let the wackos show themselves to be wackos, then quietly start operating some time later.
(Chaotic lawfully :D)
Except in the good old days things just got done when there was demand for them and NIMBYs were told to fuck off.
They also have a much bigger population using exclusively mobiles rather than landlines, since their infrastructure developed when the former was already available, and it's cheaper to just put up a few towers than run one landline to each subscriber.