...back in England, the evil Mr Brown is busy plotting to keep Britain in a dark ages Orwellian surveillance society by keeping track of everything you do, preventing people using high bandwidth requirement applications as long as possible and then insisting our copper infrastructure is great and that fibre is for heretics.

It makes you wonder if some politicians even give a rats ass if the country is going to lag behind by decades compared to other nations the way they just simply do not care about issues like this and whilst the rest of the world is taking steps forward on it they force us to take steps backwards.

Is it really all down to Brown (I'm a poet, and I know it) that fibre is extremely expensive to invest in and implement, especially when we have the type of infrastructure that we already do?

The only way a fibre network is going to be built in the UK is if net enthusiasts like myself, the AC and others pool our resources to buy the kit, lay the fibre and pay the rental charges to have it housed in exchanges or get appropriate facilities built along with an NOC to run it in a location like London thus making it easy to peer with other networks.

BT (the privatised state monopoly) will only ever do the bare minimum to keep our creaking infrastructure running but still charge us the earth for line rental in order to keep the fat cat shareholders happy.

Am game to put my money where my mouth is, are you?

And in glorious blighty where spin is far more important than facts we get NTHell^WVirgin writing to customers to say just how good thier *fibre* connection is.

Hell, if they could only keep thier coax network going it would be impressive.

You mean the type of infrastructure that starts buckling because a TV station has started making a small proportion of their media available online?

You have to admit it's really barely adequate for today's needs. Unless significant improvements are made soon, I dare not think what bandwidth will be like in 10 years time.

Paris Hilton because I dare not think what SHE'll be like in 10 years either.

Surely a nationwide rollout of FTTH would help enable an Orwellian police state? And with a webcam and microphone in every room, ISPs would have to reverse their current policies:

- Faster upload than download speed

- "Expected use" instead of "Fair use" policy and if you don't exceed the minimum threshold, you must be hiding something...

FTTH is something for your grandchildren’s grandchildren. No one in the UK is making enough profit to do the build or if they are making the money they are not willing to spend it on this technology (not least because we punters wouldn’t be willing to pay for the services at a realistic cost)

No, it's fair usage policies and traffic "management" for the UK at least until the copper / fibre hybrid network breaks down and melts!

arent you forgetting h2o networks? The sewer broadband people.

Hell, I'm not saying what we've got is adequate, I'm just saying that we have one of the oldest and most complex infrastructures already out there and being used, and migrating that many people to a new and expensive system is both time-consuming and not attractive to shareholders et al. I may not be a fan of our slack-jawed leader, but I don't think we can pin this on Brown's tail.

@ Chad H: I could be wrong, but I thought that even that method was complex in terms of sorting out access rights and things, and also with an ageing sewerage system, many areas weren't suitable anyway. Sounds great though - I'm going to research it some more...

When BT wanted to invest in laying it, they weren't allowed to offer cable TV services. If they'd been allowed to sell VOD their accountants had worked out that there were enough sad gits in the country who arrive home too late and miss the start of corry/east enders/what ever other soap, who would gladdly fund the installation of fibre to the whole country. There even enough of these a sados that they didn't need to rely on the pron crowd who funded most of the internet. But no, so as to promote competition BT were barred from offering TV services.

(OK, actually they could sell VOD coz the government hadn't thought about it, so they hadn't banned it) but they needed the cable service to go with it to make it work.)

This is what we did a few years back in Bristol for the Media industry - www.bmex.net basically we couldn't get what we wanted, at a price we wanted, so we clubbed together and get a bunch of fibre managed ethernet circuits and connected up our own network with our own kit. We all chucked some money in the hat and just did it. Ten years later and we have a meeting this week in which we might finally get the local bodies responsible for investment in the area to understand the value of supporting projects like this.

-Matt

Where I live, there is no mains sewer

We have to have a great big tank burried in the garden to

enable us to flush out toilet.

I can't see a techie cable guy turning up any time soon

to get in there with a few thousand gallons of Sh1t.

Then install a microwave tower to get fibre to our house!!

Although the pipe to it is only 40M

And another thing, when the fibre comes out of the toilet

are they really gonna put a box nearby with "DO NOT PISS ON THIS"

Another flash in the pan idea!!

"Surely a nationwide rollout of FTTH would help enable an Orwellian police state? And with a webcam and microphone in every room, ISPs would have to reverse their current policies:"

There was a virus doing the rounds once that enabled peoples webcams. Anyhow that is what the flip down privacy guard is for. What? Yours does not have one? Meh. Buy something that is not a £5 peice of crap next time.

Most of our infrastructure is the oldest.

Maybe we should invade France and start again?

... I'm still waiting for uninterrupted copper.

I have this thing called a webcam. It is connected to my computer by an USB cable. If I want to be really sure it's off, it's a piece of cake to just pull the cable out of the front of my machine...

Now ofcourse, not everyone has front USB slots to spare (I've got 4 front, 6 back. For USB devices I have a mouse, a joystick and said webcam) but it's still pretty easy to just turn it to the side...

They invariably have a light on them for exactly that reason - so you notice you left your webcam open on YIM *before* you go looking for porn...

If they went wholesale, and sold space on their network to other companies then wouldnt the money generated be able to then be invested in laying down more cables and expanding the network (from 55% coverage to around 95%), paying off their debts, and investing in faster speeds, better technologies etc

I know Virgin Media has an advantage when it comes to FIBER vs ADSL but surely if they set up a wholesale system whereby they could offer 3 broadband wholesale tiers to competitors and get some cash of the government to offer wholesale then it would out them in a fantastic position!

The problem is, even with BT bringing out the 21CN it is not going to do much for ADSL broadband speeds and it would be impossible for BT to replace all copper wiring with FIBRE anytime in the near future, whereas cable has a network built which could be improved, and 'rent' out space for broadband.

Just a thought, Virgin Media can not afford to expand the network anytime in the next 20 years so why not? It would make sense the network is there, and for expansion work with H20 to get to the remaining non cabled areas through FIBRE through the SEWERS!!!!!

The government will need to make it worth their while to do this though...

The comparison is at best misleading: the infrastructure of the US, Europe and Japan are not directly comparable, although I suppose it might be fair to compare New York and London. As American is still expanding in population it is easier to install more modern technology in new areas which pushes up penetration rates. At the same time the US is not very good at updating existing infrastructure in the backwaters or even existing cities.

But who needs these massive data rates anyway? ADSL2 seems to be fast enough for most services and is available to an ever increasing proportion of the population with UMTS finally becoming a reasonable fallback. UK investment is lagging as usual but unbundling has been reasonably successful and cable is starting to show the potential it was denied when the licences were initially awarded (under the bitch if memory serves) so that they *could* not compete with BT.