Back in the 1850's to 1900's there was a lot of community action, local towns doing their own thing, the Government led intervention was not until much later, take a little time to look into the National Grid history.

Water and sewage was driven by public health.

One reason some rural areas are rolling out their own broadband is the way they are used to having to do things for themselves, rather than rely purely on the county council or Westminster.

Yes, but they always only served 'the (local) community', not everywhere nationally.
Even with 'Community Action', somebody paid for the work to be done.

It wasn't until the power companies were nationailsed in 1947 that work began in earnest to attempt to connect every property.
Even then some remained without until about 10 years ago.

The point was that it was funded centrally by Government, where the expectation now is that a private company should be altruistic and be prepared to make a loss for the benefit of others.

Edited by deleted (Mon 18-Apr-16 19:43:37)

But the fibre is now very close to many people - the FTTC rollout has provided fibre nodes that are relatively close to most users. BT don't currently offer a way to utilise that for FTTP but they probably will soon.

And comparing fibre to the rollout of other utilities is really pointless. The other utilities have had decades to get to the reach they have - come back in 50 years and fibre might be on a par... The other utilities did not become widely available in under a decade and yet you seem to think FTTP should. It may have been possible to do more FTTP but the business case just didn't stack up when this started - you may argue that people said it did but it wasn't their money on the line.

And if you think the government should have invested more it is highly unlikely that would have gone down well in a time when there was a major recession and massive over spending.

In reply to a post by nemeth782:

BT have a few thousand exchanges across the UK. Many of these are rather large (but these days mostly empty) buildings that often have a decent amount of parking space and are in central locations. They could be converted to either flats, or large 6 bed type houses.

If we had universal FTTP, we wouldn't need telephone exchanges anymore.

If we assume FTTP rollout will cost £12bn, and there are ~5600 telephone exchanges, then a selloff of the exchanges could perhaps fund 1/4 to 1/3rd of the rollout.

Would this not make sense?

The larger exchanges could certainly be part-let as office space.

Some of the smaller ones could be eliminated.

Still need physical locations to aggregate the fibre, and unless FTTP were point to point fibre there would also be a need for equipment to fire light down it, and networking hardware to support it.

In reply to a post by panda:

The point was that it was funded centrally by Government, where the expectation now is that a private company should be altruistic and be prepared to make a loss for the benefit of others.

Which is probably no more and no less valid than the view that the government(*) is capable of organising such an expansion programme without wasting money and that, once in place, the government can be trusted to operate and maintain it well (and without wasting money).

Luckily we have examples to guide us from history. Compare/contrast the telephone network as run by the Post Office and now as run by BT. Neither system was perfect but at least I always get dial-tone when I pick my phone up and can almost ignore the price of calls - that wasn't true under the PO. I also have a very respectable internet connection - something I doubt I'd have if we were still struggling under the PO.

And we have one extra datum point to consider when talking about government control of our telecoms. It's called Theresa May.

(*)Or nationalised company, same deal really.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 19-Apr-16 12:07:02)

To be fair, the technology involved didn't exist anywhere in the world when the GPO ran the phone service.

As a technicality, IIRC the Post Office never did run it. It is the other branch formed when the GPO was split into postal and telecoms businesses.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

As a technicality, IIRC the Post Office never did run it. It is the other branch formed when the GPO was split into postal and telecoms businesses.

The Post Office started its own Telecommunication Business in the late 1870s. Other telcos were nationalised around 1912 an absorbed into it.

In the early 1970s, there was a division of the UK Post Office called Post Office Telecommunications

Actually, although my memory wasn't perfect, the Post Office appears to have been created in 1969, replacing the GPO.

What I forgot was that change preceded the internal split into the two businesses in 1980 and the final split into separate companies in 1981. I was thinking it all happened in 1980/81.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

To be fair, the technology involved didn't exist anywhere in the world when the GPO ran the phone

Agreed but they didn't seem able to get the funding to deploy the technology they had developed. A lot of clever stuff was developed in their R&D department (there's a video knocking around somewhere from the 70s or maybe even 60s) where they talk about the benefits of FTTP). Great stuff but not a lot of use when the government won't or can't release the funds needed to actually deploy it.

Edit: This isn't the one I was thinking about but it shows what the GPO R&D boffins could do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aPZbQF_Du0

Edited by Andrue (Tue 19-Apr-16 13:49:57)

That's getting to around the time Maggie put the mockers on FTTx.