The Thatcher Government stopped BT's already running rollout of FTTH in 1990. That gave us cable competition from Blueyonder who did bugger all and a BT regulated against playing in that space any more.
Hell Hastings and around Martlesham Heath (OK that doesn't really count) had FTTH in the mid 80s.
If BT had been allowed their way it'd be all FTTH by now. Regulation pushed a lot of the subsequent ADSL/VDSL product as it was all they were allowed to do.
It's only now, with broken infrastructure, and the regulator pushing for removal of those restrictions that BT got permitted to do fibre again, but this time around it's FTTC.
They didn't role it out because first of all they were barred from selling TV over fibre in the late 80s early 90s in favour of foreign cable companies. Those cable companies eventually merged to form Virgin Media.
Later BT opted for cheaper VDSL technology because it wasn't clear they would be allow to profit (due to wholesale price regulation) from FTTH investment. The expensive bit of deploying FTTH is in "holes and poles". i.e. digging up roads.
None of the other UK players want to invest in FTTH outside of major cities and only BT is legally compelled to provide any form of broadband nationally at all. Firms like CityFibre just want to cream off the most profitable areas of the country and kill off cross-subsidising the rest.
Government couldn't see past the old world of cable and watching football, BT pretty clearly could see far past just the TV. It was popping up on the news pretty regularly in the late 80s along with all the interesting things it might bring.
Me, I just wanted to consign my BT Home Highway (128K ISDN) to the bin.
What we ended up with was a travesty with BT restricted to copper only and exchange sharing for ADSL. As someone else pointed out most of what they invented got sold off to S Korea.
That has not been my experience. I live in an urban area where BT has a monopoly (no Virgin). They were not even slightly interested in deploying even FTTC -- the coverage was full of "notspots" where one house in a street had decent broadband and another up the road had none at all. BT have been quite lazy from where I stand, leaving players like CityFibre an opening.
Also, blaming Thatcher towards the end of this decade seems not to be very useful. More recently, Ofcom asked BT to consider FTTH repeatedly in aughties (2000-2010). BT declined to deploy saying "no business case" right up to Dec 2017 when their hand was forced by Ofcom. If BT were better run, they'd recognize the value in FTTH by the end of the aughties surely?
CityFibre is deploying fiber to a bunch of cities like Milton Keynes and Peterborough.
I do agree that there are a number of ISPs, like Sky and Talktalk, who are content to ride on OpenReach's coattails and build no last-mile infrastructure of their own. Virgin Media do have their own last-mile infrastructure but it's very, very limited geographically afaik.
[1]https://www.ultrafibreoptic.co.uk/ [2]https://www.talktalk.co.uk/shop/ufo/broadband
A lot of the slagging off comes from hobbyist "entrepreneurs" who think either that they can run an office on home adsl products and or/that all the consumer customers should subsidize their business
Oh and that nice Mr Murdoc whos upset that BT is competing with him for sport don't see the tabloids complaints about the Murdoch tax to watch football.
This was stopped, and everything sold to South Korea, and we know how good their internet has been for years.
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
We bought a house last year in a rural area in Scotland - not far from Edinburgh and were appalled at the broadband options. We get 20Mbps down and 1 up which is enough for most things (barely) but that was one of the fastest speeds we saw (apart from one house in the wilds of Perthshire that had 400Mpbs....).
From personal experience, it does work. You want things to get to the point where some senior executive at BT says "can you sort this cabinet out" because that's easier than dealing with all the noise from residents, councillors and MPs. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I guess it's just a dice roll. /shrug
Deploying fiber can be done in a fairly low-impact way and as long as planners don't put up roadblocks, deploying fiber to remote locations isn't a massive challenge, as a number of rural deployments demonstrate.
[1] https://www.gigaclear.com/about/case-studies-testimonials/ [2] https://www.gigaclear.com/fastershire-rollout-schedule/
I see they're based here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-275016... in yet another disused nuclear bunker.
Unfortunately the area we live isn't serviced by them - but they were very good at checking availability!
About as accurate as you'll ever get.
It does not take into account rusted, damaged wire, open cabinets where rain & moisture can enter, etc.
This tool gives me an estimate of 13 Mbps on my line - I actually only get 6, and when seeing the building's electrical & phone line cabinets, I can understand why, but as a consumer you shouldn't be required to manually try to estimate how "good" your phone line is - the ISP should be giving you an estimate you can trust.
Was amazed to see quite expensive new houses (£500K+) with no access to broadband available.
But guess how many people in house building remember to do that?
So instead they have the houses mostly finished and the sparky asks OK where do these phone points connect to? So that's when BT is called. And then BT will shrug and say you can pay our normal fee, you get copper cables, we can't promise how good the Internet service will be.
The part that's sad is people will stand there, talking to a sales person about their £350k house, checking things on their phone, and not think to ask - wait, this does have high speed internet - right? You aren't trying to sell me a brand new house that lacks Internet access are you?
Took them ages to get POTS - You can see why Civil engineers make Architect jokes
Most ISPs don't seem geared up for FTTP, so it's good for BT, as most people will just go with them.
Perhaps I am very lucky and the North East has good internet but my experience has not been bad at all.
To be fair though, DOCSIS 3.1 can push 10GB through coax so it's not all bad.
HFC for example is a shared medium across the entire neighbourhood, and in fact if you get root access on your modem and run tcpdump on the HFC interface you may see everyone else's packets as well - there's optional encryption built into DOCSIS but I've never seen it enabled.
It's annoying that we defer to them...
I could get 2000mbps with Comcast and can only get 25mbps with AT&T...
Like BT, Virgin Media is fibre to the cabinet and then copper for the last mile. It's just that the coaxial copper and the DOCSIS protocol used by Virgin do a better job at speed than the twisted pair copper and the VDSL protocol used by BT.
It's going to be very interesting to see how they advertise real fibre to the public when it arrives, if even on Hacker News there's confusion about it.
But I have to say that BT has been a very reliable ISP and the speeds are OK (in spite of being copper) with the exception of Sunday evenings.
Doesn't seem like it though. Also there's a deal where if BT says "This upgrade makes no commercial sense" (so they won't do it without government money) but then they make money off the upgrade, there's a "claw back" which gets back the extra money. Several of those clawbacks have now triggered in fact, and the money was used to fund yet more broadband.
TBH 11 Mbs is fine for a consumer do they realy need more I only get 3.8 or so and I only ever have the odd hang on iplayer every 9 months
Also FTTC is asymmetric, which means 11Mbps down corresponds to something quite horrible up. Which means video conferencing doesn't work well. Which means home-working, Skype, video chat, etc are all hobbled. In fact, I know people with fiber broadband whose children use 4G for video chat at home.
The example I usually give is that with ubiquitous gigabit internet in a city, you could send your kids to school even on a "snow day" because the teacher would be able to assemble the class and do something useful together even if the school was physically inaccessible.
The way medicine and medical care for the elderly/less mobile is provisioned would change with gigabit internet. Telemedicine and remote diagnostic tools would be a lot more popular than they are now.
These are just some thoughts as an average consumer who's not connected to the telecoms business at all (but has spent a lot of time trying to get decent internet service out of ISPs).
Telemedicene and Video conferencing have been the latest thing in telecoms for decades.
Just because you singular want something doesn't mean its sensible in the context of planning your countries national infrastructure or sense for a national telco which has to balance multiple needs.
And what happens when some pensioner askes the PM during an election why there pension is not going up and "they" are subsiding these kids dowoading porn on facetubes - ask Gordon brown about being ambushed like this.
Copper Ethernet RJ45 is the best. No more modem, just plug and play. Installing a Ethernet cable is, assuming enough space in the pipe, can be easily pulled through using whatever force you like, I don't think you can actually do any damage to the cable while installing it.
The telephone wire, It is a little hard to imagine a home without these wires. ( May be there are parts of the world which don't have them a default? I don't know ). There is no need to do installing. It is Modem then plug and play. G.Fast A3 actually allows 212Mhz and Dynamic allocation of Upstream and Downstream bandwidth. And gets 300Mbps + for 300M from Cabinet, and 500Mbps or those within 200M.
I used to long for Fibre, but then when the installation comes, it either works perfectly in pipes that get pulled through, or you have to lay them out in the open and are warned they are extremely brittle. Which gets me a few phone call from friends getting nervous saying they would much rather stick with Cable or telephone wire with VDSL. Or in one case where she only has a 6M ADSL she just flat out cut the services and didn't want fibre's hassle. She is mostly on Mobile Phone anyway and her unlimited 4G plans is fast enough for what she needs. The only time she needs WiFi is when she is doing IOS update and that could be done in Office. And when the times Massive MIMO, 5G NG comes with high increase in capacity and speed. I can only imagine there will be more doing just that.
A lot of times we nerds, geeks, tech savvy enthusiast just wanted faster speed, cheaper, better tech whatever. Fibre allow us going to 10Gbps! ( Yes there are 10Gbps Internet services to Home ), without actually asking if or do the many user cares. Last mile is a hard problem, and I wish more thoughts will be put in design and installation parts.
Luckily we have people working on TerabitDSL, with spaces in between copper wires and using Waveguide-mode that is similar to use of millimeter-wave transmissions in 5G. [1]
Not to be That Guy, but RJ45 is a plug standard; normal ethernet cable is "cat5" or "cat6", and normal 10/100/1000 Ethernet is limited to just 100 meters. Which is completely useless given the average cabinet distances in the UK.
Though I suspect that most ELM is delivered over fibre and the CPE just presents a RJ45 fo ryou to plug your TOR Router into.
I mean, you still have some kind of consumer equipment there, which the ISP will likely be supplying for almost all users anyway – so that's quite a specific thing.
Despite the headline figures, G.fast will not achieve anything close to that.
And I have to say that all seems like a little short-term thinking. The fragility of fibre in a permanent installation is hardly a convincing argument.
If you are in a new building, without furniture and mess, fibre of course make sense. If you live in a Small Apartment, old making installation difficult, Fibre isn't so great. My guess is that the problem may be specific to cities.
Of course people who still have landlines nowdays probably have cordless ones that require a powered base station, but I assume that at least in the UK, the line must be left powered during power cuts.
I've never actually seen any ISP there even advertise a battery backup unit, I guess if you need they'll just tell you to buy a standard UPS.
No idea how it works in the UK, haven't had consumer-grade fibre here yet, always just got business-grade stuff where you bring your own hardware & UPS if needed.
I've installed (business) fibre links on 6 continents, handoff has always been a pair of fibres (usually LC or SC), usually with a /30 ipv4/ethernet, and a routed network pointing at my end of the handoff (or in the case of private peering, a BGP configuration)
My FTTH from BT is a single fibre (no idea if it's compatible with generic bidirectional sfps). This runs into an Openreach converter box - powered by a battery backup - which has 2 phone outputs and 4 rj45s.
My core mikrotik plugs into one of the rj45s and establishes a pppoe session with BT's network.
Given the rate at which people -- especially younger people -- are getting rid of landlines in the UK I suspect in the future this'll be a non-issue. To be honest I'm not sure why I have a landline still.
I’ve never actually had a landline on fiber ever. It was always just standard Ethernet on top of which I run whatever I want (SIP client or WiFi calling).
How was that “landline” working? Do they give you a little converter that turns Ethernet into a standard phone jack (and converts it to SIP internally), or is there some other non-IP based signaling for that voice traffic?
The reason the UK is on a mix of copper and fiber is because the entrenched monopoly, BT, didn't think fiber to the home (FTTH) was worth investing in. To protect their investment in their existing copper network, they pushed tech like VDSL/FTTC (up to 80Mbps) and now G.Fast (up to 500Mbps), which are "fiber to the cabinet" but the last mile is copper. The problem is, speeds fall off depending on how far your home is from the cabinet. I've seen many non-technical consumers be disappointed and say "the ISP said I can only get 11Mbps but they advertise up to 80Mbps".
BT have now been told by the telecoms regulator to prioritize deploying fiber to the home. Also, serious money is now pouring into alternative network providers. CityFibre, which is installing its own gigabit-grade fiber network in about 30 UK cities (so home users in all these cities can be offered FTTH), was recently acquired by a consortium with fairly deep pockets. BT, which historically was the entrenched monopoly, is no longer the sole arbiter of the UK's broadband future.