They didn't screw up over G.INP. The screwup was allowing distribution of ECI modems to people on Huawei cabinets, which initially wasn't supposed to happen. But at the time, no-one knew G.INP was a possible enhancement to the system, so it wasn't particularly important.

If they had simply spotted the problem during field testing, they would have fixed it then in exactly the same way as they have done now. None of us would have known the difference and we would have been rightly pleased at the improvement on H-H setups.

In reply to a post by therioman:

In reply to a post by zom22:

So I'm going to remind people over and over again how bad it was when it WAS in public ownership.

Nothing has changed - it's taken me 6 months to get a line installed for a customer recently

The tales of woe from the days of the publicly-owned GPO are bunkum; historical revisionism, as it were. "I can remember waiting for two years just to get a dial-tone" Yeah, sure!

There was a specific unit of the British Government that cooked up these tales. It was called the Civil Contingencies Unit (CCU) and was led by ex-spook Sir Clive Rose, a Thatcherite of the far-right.

Rose admitted in interview that his Unit was told to fabricate shock-stories to demonise nationally-owned industry. By design, paving the way for privatisations of those public assets, including the GPO. It was the Black Propaganda Unit of the banksters.

All manner of lies were told in that push for privatisation; through orders passed down by international financiers via their private thinktank, the Mont Pelerin Society. These perps of the Mont Pelerin Society were the ones who actually created Thatcher, and 'her' Thatcherite policies of flogging-off-the-family-silver.

Now, as we all witness, the grass is no greener post-privatisation. The network is in a terrible mess. The copper infrastructure is long past its use-by-date. Yet privately-owned BT won't replace it; not while it can gouge a few more shekels out of us.

Answerable in the main to anonymous shareholders, BT is now minded not to invest any further in fibre roll-out, while Ofcom reviews its wider business. Someone please explain how that non-accountability of a private business is better for UK plc?

Edited by deleted (Tue 21-Jul-15 09:31:20)

All you need to know is BT is Mr Evil and can do nothing right and FTTC is a total farce.

The fact that millions seem to be getting on with live and work using the connections seems to escape some people.

The house analogy some are using is very current, as willing to bet those properties now under the proposed Heathrow footprint are going to have trouble selling or prices going down.

BT is doing exactly what Sky and TalkTalk would do if the situation was reversed.

And nationalise Openreach - which planet are you on? A fair valuation would be around £30billion, so where is your cheque book? Around £1500 per household in the UK, I am sure you can afford it and if you don't mind paying my share too.

Not responsible, not competent? Try analysing how BT has changed the telecoms market in the UK. Changes from old analog networks to full digital exchanges, early investment in "secure radio" or what is now called Cellular/GSM, development of DSL technologies - a lot of design and development was carried out by BT, airborne telephony and internet connectivity, designed and implemented the first trans-ocean fibre optic link and further development of leading edge fibre technology , interactive TV developments in the mid 90s (and then barred from exploiting it), VOIP - implemented in the early 90s.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

BT is doing exactly what Sky and TalkTalk would do if the situation was reversed.

Dear Mr Sky,

As you have plenty of transponder leases and the receiving equipment in UK homes, we are informing you that from 1 December you will hand over capacity to other vendors:

Virgin Media - 10%
BT Sport 15%
IPL Cricket Franchise 5%
others 10%.

The charges will be restricted to the link costs with no profit element and you will fully maintain the receivers with any upgrade required to allow reception of alternate service provided FOC.

Hope you understand,

OFCOM!




20% of yor capacity must be handed over to Virgin Media,

If there was some guarantee that a new Openreach would deploy FTTP nationally, rather than just be a continuation of what we have now then maybe value to a break up - but not sure how you do that.

Plus a nationalised local loop would then still be a monopoly in the same way, but with the full weight of Government to fend off interesting new alt-nets.

To be honest surprised the nuclear option of selling network to Sky or TalkTalk has not been put on the table.

More rubbish.

As a potential GPO customer, we had to wait over 9 months for connection. My grandmother had a wait of well over a year. My grandfather suffered with a party line for well over 10 years ...


Who are these anonymous shareholders? It is a public document that lists the all and subject ot certain privacy and data security issues, you can purchase a copy.

One big failing is that a majority of people do not realise the actual magnitude of some of the investments that BT has made and is continuing to make. They do not realise the cost of laying a connection to some of the small villages in the Highlands of Scotland - an exchange handling just 20 connections for example - tens of thousands to get a fibre connection there to allow ADSL options. Will it ever pay back? Unlikely.

People do not understand why large population centres need to be done first - to get a payback to provide money for the next phase.

There seems to be a perception that BT can just pull billions of pounds out of the air and that the costs just disappear and should never be met by the end users.

And not just investment - customers expect a cheap service then complain when a technician is not available within an hour to fix a fault. They are not prepared to pay extra to allow BT staff to be sitting around waiting and ready to jump as soon as a fault is detected.

So as the elected representative for a renewed Labour, how do they promise that a new Openreach would guarantee a national FTTP roll-out in their first term?

Irony being that based on current timescales 2020 to 2025 is when FTTP would probably be starting to be delivered in volume by Openreach anyway and maybe sooner if TalkTalk plans of 10 million FTTH homes passed on their CityFibre network start to deliver in the next couple of years.

My real worry is if there is a prospect of a nationalised monopoly people like CityFibre will not be able to undercut this network and lose interest.

The very faults of Openreach actually make it more likely that we will see three or four commercial local loops with zero risk to the public purse options for a large chunk of the UK.

The tales of woe from the days of the publicly-owned GPO are bunkum; historical revisionism, as it were. "I can remember waiting for two years just to get a dial-tone" Yeah, sure!

Rubbish. You clearly have a very short memory or are still wet behind the ears. Probably both.

There was a specific unit of the British Government that cooked up these tales.

Yet another lie and shows how little you know about pre-privatised BT and the GPO before that. Before spouting off about how lovely everything will be when nationalised I suggest you take a cold hard look at what an abject failure BT was prior to 1984.