UKH

https://news.sky.com/story/general-election-labour-promises-free-broadband-...

Having never voted Conservative and generally voted Labour, I was in 2 minds about either Labour (not that I'm happy with them) or Lib Dem.

Maybe I can be brought with free internet. As long as its not with Talk Talk.

What do we think all mouth and no trousers ?

TWS 

I think there's a decent case to be made for nationalising natural monopolies such as broadband but I'm not as expert on the industry so hard to know if there are any hidden benefits or efficiencies driven by competition.

I imagine access to fast internet is sure to have wider economic and social benefits far in excess of the costs so if the private sector is not getting it done then I'd be more than happy for my tax money to be spent in this way, seems a reasonable investment.

When it’s free for everyone, who pays?  Keeping in mind that all money ultimately derives its worth from the people the ultimate answer is “the people” one way or another.

I’m so glad that times are so calm and mundane the leading opposition can afford to prat around like this.

The real issue is not the cost of broadband but it’s patchy availability. There is little point legislating against the moribund fatcat utilities to improve this now that SpaceX are launching 60 Starlink satellites every couple of weeks. I’m exceptionally excited about ditching our crap broadband from BT and paying SpaceX for something 50 times as fast.  I’d rather my cash went to funding their rocket developments than BTs lumbering carcass.  If I was BT I’d be calculating the total worth of my buried copper and making plans to sell it off...

Free BB if we win. Whoop whoop. When do I get it? 2030. You are only in power to 2024. Oh right, yeah, if we win this one and the next one. Wink Wink

Despite my initial misgivings I think this is actually a very good idea.

Openreach have failed to meet their targets for rolling out for many years, and that's the "old style" ISDN lines...

There's a strong argument to say it should never have been privatised. They have an effective monopoly and no incentive to improve.

Look at South Korea where they have a state company that has rolled out massively fast broadband, the way they have changed the country from an agriculture based economy into a Tech based company - you can see there are clear benefits to the economy, not to mention side benefits like making it realistic for people in rural areas to work remotely. This is what we need if we want to reduce inequality, reduce traffic on our roads etc.

My only reservation is that before it becomes "free to all" it needs to be rolled out into rural communities especially across the north.

It's a fair point . I'm following SpaceX quite closely as I'm interested in the space developments.

My post was tongue in cheek , hence the smiley wink.

That often goes unnoticed online .

More a talking point the story and I just wondered what everyone's take on it was

Yup, better to put the 20bn into the next generation tech, not the one that is current (being kind). I can get 100Gb data per month mobile data for less than £30 per month now from basically any mobile provider. The only downside compared to landline based is going to be speed. Which I bet could be significantly improved with 20bn of investment.........   

Aye, we should invent some new frequencies with the cash . I can see wireless internet happily replacing all cabled network connections then. Speed is probably not the issue though, 5G is crazy fast. ~2Gbit in ideal circumstances. Faster than all broadband on the market? The problem is capacity rather than speed.

Better yet to be the country that spend £5 Bn innovating to create that future tech and then reap the worldwide income.

Once again that won’t be the UK despite our strong academic and industrial base...

Don’t mind me; I just hijacked your post for a rant.

I’d sooner a certain allowance of energy was made “free” than broadband.  As long as broadband is available for all there are other priorities in life.  With a “free” energy allowance per person you create a massive psychological lever to encourage people to keep their usage within the allowance, as the marginal cost they experience for going above it “gamifies” energy usage in a way smart meters don’t. 

That's an interesting proposition certainly.

Tax? I'd happily pay £25/month extra tax for nationalised broadband than £25/month to a shitty broadband provider, half of which goes to shareholders.

If you want to cut energy use in the home, make pre-payment meters a legal requirement, and allow a maximum of £20 or thereabouts to be put on at any one time (and not until it runs down to say £1).  If we have to actively pay for energy before we use it, we'll notice it a lot more than if we just set up a direct debit and forget about it, as most people do - particularly given the way that DD lets us spread the cost smoothly through the year to a payment that is near enough just a fixed cost subscription.

Broadband is extremely comparable to road, rail or other utilities in terms of its provision and options for funding.

As such, the infrastructure (fibre, roads, tracks, drains) should be seen as a basic requirement to be provided and maintained. The way people then use this infrastructure and pay for its use is then open to various options, including privatised suppliers (e.g. rail companies or toll road operators) , indirect payment (fuel tax, vehicle duty) and direct tax funding.

Worst case is that many - particularly in rural areas - are denied access to what is rapidly becoming an essential utility, simply because private companies can't see a profit motive to provide it.

Nonsense. BT are required to install broadband by the government by 2025. It’s a regulated company. 
 

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/10/new-openreach-trials-bring-fu...

No idea what planet Labour are on. 

Far too many years ago, I studied network and signal theory. Forgotten almost all of it now, but I seem to remember that pushing more data over a network requires higher frequencies and more power, with probably some inverse square distance to signal strength business thrown in. I suspect more data requires exponentially more power, or, more simply... 'crazy' may turn out to be the correct adjective but not in the way you intended. 

Please direct me at the part of my post you're dismissing as nonsense.

Sure, but who do you think is going to get the government contract to deliver the state provided broadband?  

It’s really odd to talk about nationalising broadband as a priority when in the hierarchy of survival the utilities are water > power > broadband.  Then again it’s odd to talk about nationalising anything when there’s a giant pink elephant in the room.

It’s rarely denied - it’s just that the utilities will charge you total cost to provide it which for a small village could be £80k making it prohibitively expensive.  If you ever enquired about having a property hooked up to the electric grid when it’s not right next to a pylon, you’ll soon find out that the electricity network operator will charge a similar amount to hook you up.

Mandating provision at tax payers expense is a funny one - I totally agree for say a village.  We’d looked at buying a house 3 miles from anywhere and it was going to cost a fortune to get a phone line run out - if I chose to buy there, should everyone else subsidise me?

As I’ve said elsewhere, I think this will soon become a moot discussion as high speed Internet from space (without the data caps from existing providers) is going to be here very soon.  The technology will leapfrog the expense of rolling out broadband to every last rural area.  
 

“Worst case is that many - particularly in rural areas - are denied access to what is rapidly becoming an essential utility, simply because private companies can't see a profit motive to provide it.”

I heard JMCD on the radi this morning . There were so many holes in his argument it was like the Titanic going down fast.

~ how are you going to compete with Skyview, Virgin etc?

~are you going to slash the saalries of the high earners in a powerful tech sector who can up sticks and go to other employers. How does that fit in with Labours plans on high earners?

~ you announced to the markets a few months ago, no more nationalisation. this is a new one, how can you be trusted?

_~Water is more important than broadband, why not let everybody have that for free. Its a more importnat resource?

Badly thought out. Its like the 32 hour week. Its years off.

Correct. 5G only offers mega speeds when you're close to a mast and no-one else is using it. The top speeds also require use of high frequencies which are easily attenuated by things like trees and buildings.  5G routers / phones are also mega expensive. The main practical benefit over 4G (the latest versions of which can now do 1Gbps) is lower latency because it's natively IP-based.  Low latency is only really of benefit to gamers, automated stock trading platforms (which won't use 5G anyway), and driverless cars.  To provide 5G coverage matching 4G coverage at the super-high speeds touted around will require a lot more base sites than there are now.

You'll have to explain to me why that's nonsense. Just because there's currently a long-term policy to avoid it happening does not prevent it from being a worst case situation. I think you were reading into my post something that wasn't actually expressed.

If water was free everyone would waste it and there wouldn't be any left.

Good point.  Also, will everyone then have the right to certain devices to adequately exploit the technology - broadband is useless without a end-user device which can take advantage ? It does seem really odd to nationalise something that is so obviously subject to rapid change based upon innovation.   The unintended consequence could be to tax innovation of a rapidly changing environment and then all investment in broadband as a technology in this country will stop overnight.

As a country we will spend billions on something which will likely be out of date and not required by the time it is finished rolling out !  

In some ways it could be regarded as odd but at the moment as had been mentioned, rural communities are becoming more isolated as more and more of lives become reliant on fast internet access. I think it's also important to remember that those on low income can really struggle to pay £30 a month or so for what is becoming an essential service and this applies even more to the unemployed who have to have internet access as a condition of receiving benefits. You have to access websites (I forget which) on a daily basis to show you're looking for work.

So, should it be nationalised? I think there's more of an argument for nationalising BB than there is for nationalising the post office. Should it be free? I think it needs to be free to some but am less convinced it should be free for all. How about levying a road tax on the information super highway and giving free tax disks to those who can't pay?

I'm sorry, this is a terrible idea. Being able to spread the cost of your energy over the year makes a huge difference to cash flow and a scheme like this is likely to cause significant problems for people on lower incomes. You'd end up with huge numbers of people, often vulnerable families and pensioners, being cut off from heat and power in the winter, something that's currently restricted for certain groups of people. Not to mention the fact that prepayment meters are a total ballache. I had a prepayment meter for the first 6 months of the year and it was stressful and irritating, even though I was lucky enough that mine was a smart meter and could be topped up electronically rather than requiring a trip to a shop that was a paypoint.

The problem with building telecom networks is the 80/20 rule - you can supply 80% of the population and make money at it, but the other 20% are massively unprofitable. For example, putting fibre to a block of luxury apartments in Kensington where all the users pay for the highest speed option is way more profitable than putting fibre to a little old lady in the back of beyond in rural Wales where there's 20 poles between her house and the road, let alone the 3km to the nearest village.  The network operators won't serve those rural customers unless government forces them to, or incentivises them to by doing something like interest-free loans to pay for the capital expenditure.  The other problem with giving everyone fibre is the equipment to go in the exchanges is much more expensive to buy and run than copper-based equipment, and has a lower life expectancy. This again reduces the profitability.

The logical scenario is to have a national network provider with competing service providers using that network to provide services on. This would almost certainly give the lowest cost to consumers.  There would be scope to competitively contract out the provision of the network.

It’s an excellent way to increase the UK’s food wastage though! Imagine all the freezers going off unexpectedly.

The government have committed to providing broad band to rural communities by 2025. Labour are going to do it by 2030. And that’s better? 
 

It’s only 5 years away. Fibre only came to our  village 2 years ago and before that we had apparently been struggling and disadvantaged. In fact the only problem we had was my son couldn’t live stream his XBox. No one died of startvation because they couldn’t get online Tesco delivery. 
 

It’s a first world problem. 
 

It may be down to not being profitable but I’d suggest digging up miles and miles of road and cutting off communities for days while they lay cable could also be part of the delay. A nationalised service will still have costs and still have to answer to the government in exactly the same way that BT do. 
 

I’m just bewildered by Labours “we will solve all your problems, tomorrow, for free” promises. We know they can’t and won’t. 

I take your point about the importance of broadband - but it’s still less important than water (death in 3 days) or power (not able to use broadband if nout else) so I can’t see the logic in nationalising it as a fix for anything.

If the government want it in all villages they can contract to providers to do this at tax payers expense without all the financial theatre of nationalisation.  

I also take your point about job seekers - in my noddy world view, if the government requires a person to have X to access their job seeker’s support, the government should provide X.  Again this doesn’t require nationalisation but a fair and reasonable level of benefits, potentially with a system that allows certain bills to be picked up by the state directly.  (Not “Vouchers”, that being a trigger word for vulture middleware companies)

Er, it being free?

Look at private medical insurance.  The NHS is free to everyone.  Yet Bupa etc do well enough out of those who want a higher quality service for whatever reason.  I've never considered it worth it myself, but plenty do.  So they might upgrade their broadband to a higher speed or higher cap too?

It’s such a bizarre unforced error. A weak and flawed policy, on a topic nobody cared about, that opens them up to further examination in one of the areas that they are vulnerable to losing middle ground voters (nationalising everything). Announcing it is such an own goal.

Assuming that there is some kind of election strategy at Labour HQ it’s interesting to consider what might have provoked it.

Sometimes it seems like they’ve lost all touch with the centre ground and they think that if they double down on the hard left those people will choose to vote twice or something. 

...who are often on them anyway.

But I bet you had a good appreciation of your energy use.

In terms of “right to use it” - I imagine listed buildings regulations are going to cause problems for some, and access to roof area for the terrestrial terminals is going to be a headache for people in apartments etc.  Conversely a whole apartment block of 10 households could be better served by one Starlink terminal that by 10 “Super fast” broadband lines.

Surely not?

as long as it is not with Talk Talk!!!!! The worst company ever

Yes, like with the trains!

It’s a return to the disastrous Labour policies of the 90s where they promised everyone the government would look after them. They can’t and then we end up with a generation of people expecting the government to look after them. 
 

Labour are trying to appeal to that demographic. 

You appear to be arguing against what I can only presume you think I believe, rather than with anything I have stated.

Everybody uses everyone elses cables etc. How does that all work out?

Will the new BB nationalise all cable networks owned by them as well?

Its all a bit badly thought out.

But I think we should be moving the other way and getting people off them, rather than imposing them on more people. Being able to heat and power your home should be a basic human right in a developed country like the UK. It's been estimated that cold homes contribute to around 10,000 excess deaths each winter, with more than 3000 of those being directly linked to fuel poverty. Additionally you have people who don't die but whose health conditions are worsened by living in cold homes, which then carry their own cost to the NHS. There is an NEA analysis of this but for some reason I can't get onto their site at the moment to post the link.

I was very aware of it but there's a limit to what you can do to reduce those costs. I live in a solid walled terrace house with no loft insulation. Like many in energy inefficient housing, this is privately rented so there's nothing I can do to improve the property and the government's landlord regulation on this is absolutely laughable! The house is rarely warmer than 18 degrees but during the day it's not uncommon for the living spaces to fall to 12-14 degrees. If you're stuck at home it becomes increasingly difficult to function in those temperatures for long periods of time, even with warm clothing, blankets and hot drinks, and that's speaking as someone without health or mobility issues.

I just do not get why any political party in their right mind would want to take on the responsibilites of managing broadband, water, power , raliways etc.

You are setting yourself up for a huge  backlash when a nationalised  network fails or does not deliver.

The big advantage at the moment is that any govt keeps it well away from tarnishing their political party.. Its the private company who really takes the  grief.

Best have these things well and truly at arms length.

So one government promises something and a "generation of people" fall for it? You aren't really stupid enough to believe that, now are you. 

Or are you..............

By the way, what were these policies? Bearing in mind labour were only in power for less than 30% of the nineties........

That certainly requires legislation, I would suggest:-

1. A slackening of "listed building" and planning regulations as concerns energy conservation - e.g. we really need to wipe out single-glazed windows entirely (actually ban them) and stop this obsession with sashes.  uPVC doesn't look nice but it really is better.

2. Minimum energy requirements to rent a house out - if it doesn't meet them, you can't let it at all, and a time period to bring current lets up to spec.

With healthcare the general adage is you can pick any two of "Quick", "Cheap" and "Good". The NHS has always been run on the cheap/good side of things by making people wait, although the current push for things like GP at Hand is more quick/cheap by sacrificing quality.  Private healthcare isn't really any higher quality in terms of outcomes, but you pay for quicker access.

I'd worry that state broadband would be similar to the NHS - either shit and cheap or good but have to wait months for it - pointless if you're renting and moving every 6 months.

They were in power from 1997 to 2008! That’s 11 years. 
 

And no. I didn’t fall for it. Those years are when the millennials were teenage and early 20s. 
 

Ah. Ok. You wrote that the broadband companies weren’t providing broadband to villages because it wasn’t profitable. Do you not believe that? I’m confused now. 

I agree, I just don't get what the problem is with "only" having normal broadband, the speed of which would have seemed mind-boggling only a few years ago. 

I could understand it for business use in some cases or if you literally have no internet connection at all but for everyone else, I really don't see why having fibre broadband gives you any advantage at all.

Until a year or so ago we had broadband over the phone line and that was fine for SD iPlayer, youtube and the like. We have now upgraded to fibre at the box which gives us about 20-30Mbps. The only improvement I can see is you can stream HD films without buffering.

Can someone explain to me why going from 10-20Mbps to 50-100Mbps is anything but a luxury for those with high data demands? 

I didnt ask if you fell for it - I asked if you were stupid enough to believe it...........hmmmm, given you didn't read properly / understand my comment.........

So which policies were you referring to?

Plus the food that's wasted because you've got no gas or electricity to cook it!

Totally agree. Our current place does have double glazed windows and uPVC doors and they make a huge difference to comfort levels.

More regulation is needed for the private rented sector but I think it's vanishingly unlikely to happen. The current requirements are for new lets to be a minimum EPC Band E but a) that's still a bit shit and b) landlords don't have to do it if they can't get any funding for it. Given that the energy saving obligations on energy companies have been slashed over the last 6-7 years and the Green Deal was an absolute disaster this just isn't going to happen as the funding no longer exists. Even where funding does exist it's unlikely to cover the kind of work needed as the majority are hard to treat, often solid walled properties. Longer term, this is also storing up problems for the need to shift the UK away from individual gas fired central heating as poorly insulated homes are unsuitable for lower input electric or district heating.

The quote I heard was ‘fibre broadband’. It’ll take a decent chunk of the £20bn just to wire it down the valley we live in 😂

do you think children should have equal access to the internet?  While there are problems with this manifesto pledge, giving an educationally more level set of opportunities that are not limited by parental ability to buy broadband is a good idea.  It is an infrastructure requirement that schools place on the home now.

can't come too soon for me. The BT infrastructure based on non-fibre round us deprives me of radio spectrum.  Bloody streaming can go fibre to my advantage

But given you're typing that out on an internet forum - you can go the back of the queue.

Yeah, but I’m connecting via 4G

circus maximus, innit

Oh please. It doesn't reflect well on you to misquote and misrepresent me to win an argument you seem to be having with yourself.

Yes, but we don't need full-fibre to do so, we just need enough bandwidth to let them watch i-player (10Mb).  The best solution to providing internet for all would be a mix of fibre, copper, and 4/5G as each technology has its advantages in different situations.  Fibre suffers fewer faults, copper uses existing infrastructure, and radio can be quick and cheaper than cabling.

Satellite broadband is laggy as hell. It may be able to offer reasonable bandwidth for streaming / downloading data volumes, but responsiveness for gaming and general web use is rubbish.

You may be right but I do wonder whether WT has a point. There is a difference between running a company that uses mature technology such as the railways and one that is involved with rapidly evolving technology. If it isn't SpaceX that makes fibre optic obsolete, will something else come along which does and if so will a nationalised company be structured and financed in a way that allows it to react quickly enough?

copper is a filthy way of providing internet, polluting but cheap, agreed.

Can you make your position a bit clearer then? 

Geostationary satellite internet is very laggy.

Starlink is low (and one day, very low) earth orbit. It will be comparable or better latency than wired connections.

Starlink should have much lower latency transatlantic connections than under-ocean fibre, because the additional distance from being in low orbit is only a few hundred miles, where as the slower speed of light in glass fibre across the Atlantic is equivalent to several thousand miles of free space.

There are already several “dark” networks across Europe using microwave repeaters to give financial traders lower latency links than fibre.  The first company to offer free space links across the Atlantic is going to make a fortune.

Its also why some finance industry people are interested in hollow core “photonic” fibres.  Pretty soon it’ll be cheaper to launch a bunch of satellites than to lay a new transatlantic cable however.

I think this may be where you've been going wrong. I wasn't presenting a 'position'.

Rather, a comparison with other analogous services that have seen a variety of funding models, with the intention of helping readers make their own connections as to the relevance, appropriateness or difficulties of different funding models when considered in relation to high speed data access.

Feel free to vehemently disagree!

Right! I just ran speedtest, and we’re getting about 23mb/s download, which will run multiple Netflix etc. I work from home a lot and download large image datasets from work with no problem. When we first moved here, we got by ok on about 3.5mb/s average.

Do people not know how inefficient, hopeless, corrupt, unresponsive to new technology, new requirements, or changing working practices, and expensive, GPO telephones, BT, and British Gas, etc. were as monopolies before privatization  ?

This is your prejudices showing. Which disastrous policies? Things like the highly successful Sure Start programme, which had beneficial effects both on children and their families? When did they promise to look after everyone? What's the evidence that this generation as a whole is 'expecting the government to look after them'?

How do you know this?

This is what you wrote.....

"Worst case is that many - particularly in rural areas - are denied access to what is rapidly becoming an essential utility, simply because private companies can't see a profit motive to provide it."

So why are you attacking DoR for saying you said the above when you said ... the above, which is private companies won't provide rural broadband because there's no profit in it for them. Or does your message have a hidden meaning that only you can understand?

Jesus, even I'm getting wound up now!

If you read what you quoted in context, it's abundantly clear that the reference to "worst case" is hypothetical, following the pattern of the previous paragraph, and made no claim or accusation that that is actually what is happening now.

As it happens it appears that there are plenty of rural areas that actually are finding it difficult to obtain good data access right now, but that's another issue and was not implied nor intended from my original post. 

Anyone else determined to start an internet brawl?

It is a gift to the tories. 

National broadband provides the investment to ensure all of the country has fast broadband. Paid for by you and I. 

Next tory government privatise it at a knock down price to their rich chums who profit from our investment. 

What have you got against wood? It's renewable, low energy of production, and as insulating (or better) than PVC. Many passive house windows are wood. 

Oi! that was my question. I demand he answers mine first!

I'm not holding my breath though..........

We need to ask Alan et al for a "Car Park" forum, where such matters can be taken to be settled in the traditional pub argument fashion........

Laugh-out-loud comment of the day!

You might have a point, except that people are beginning to notice how appalling the current system of private monopolies and oligopolies is. 

With 5 BILLION Pounds of our money.
Typical Toryism, subsidise the private sector with public money.

Just change your forum name to 'Anything Labour suggests is wrong', we all know anyway!

Oh, and it's worth remembering that Thatcher's obsession with competition killed BT's scheme for fibre broadband by 1990:

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadba...

It's a lie. 

Another one.

Won't happen. Or, atleast, it'd take so long to happen that the tech will be totally superceded by that point. 

I hope all the politicians lose and subsequently  have their homes invaded by belligerent and aggressive badgers. 

How about the tax on the tech giants? Seems like a good idea given the tech giants can pay less tax than smaller UK businesses.

A large increase in the welfare state. Looks good on paper all the wealth redistribution but what are we left with?

People on subsidised wages. Zero hour contracts. 
 

I completely disagree with attempting to tax corporations and individuals who are making money from low wages and then continuing the cycle by giving the proceeds of the tax to the employees. It’s tinkering. 
 

Taxation should be used to provide services, and backup to people who can’t work, not to allow companies to underpay the workforce. 

That’s what I mean by looking after people. 
 

What happens when these payments have to be reduced? It’s all the fault of the Tories austerity. It’s bonkers. 

No. I’m not a fan of Labour. I’m not a fan of the Tories either. Both of them tinkering instead of proposing brave solutions. 

Yet when Labour promise spending £20billion it’s a good idea? It’ll cost way more than £20billion. I shudder to think how much  nationalising  OpenReach would actually cost.

If the government want a private company to provide something that’s not profitable why shouldn’t the government pay for it? 

This comment alone settles the argument over the like buttons. 

Not sure where you're coming from. At the moment there are many people living in in work poverty. Their wages are subsidised through tax credits. Under s Labour government the minimum wage would rise and so fewer people would need their incomes subsidised.

Labour have pledged to eliminate zero hours contracts.

Calm down dear!!!

If you had said "hypothetically, the worst case scenario is", then fair enough. But you didn't.

Anyway, I'm off to the Pub where I will wade in to some arbitrary disagreements with my tackety boots and start a couple of car park brawls before slinking off into the dark night.

Minimum wage hits small business hardest. It doesn’t ensure that people are remunerated according to the contribution they make to a company. It’s tinkering. 
 

Zero hour contracts are great for people who want them. Many people only want to work when they want to work. Eliminating them is pointless. 
 

Both are problems created by Labour in the first place. 

Arguing against minimum wage is very similar to the arguing against most EU employment or environmental regulations: whyever would you think it ok to be able to fall below even the accepted minimal levels?

Zero hours contracts are more complicated as there are genuine cases where they make perfect sense (e.g. snow clearing of business premises.) But they need to be very much more heavily regulated than they are at present in order to ensure that employees cannot easily be exploited.

Where do you get the idea Labour introduced zero hours contracts?  They’ve been around for a long long time. In fact Blair said Labour were going to stop them before he got elected but obviously that never happened. 

I dream of 10Mbps...

Ensuring every household has access to a minimum of 10Mbps download (that doesn't drop to 0.1 when 2 people in the village use it simultaneously) is surely better than 80% get gigabit speeds and the other 20% are ignored?

Are you one these people who actually belief the shit adverts that the like of Amazon are pumping out about their incredibly happy work force on prime time TV ad slots? Gosh, I wish I'd work there.

Mug baby, MUG!

Your memory is faulty.

In 1991 BT were in the process of rolling out fibre to the home, when the Thatcher government made the political decision to shut the project down, and sold off the factories we had built to supply the hardware. 

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadba...

If we hadn't privatised BT we'd have had a far better broadband infrastructure in place 20 years ago than we have today, and we'd all have gigabit connections by now.

A random statement.  How does that relate to my post ?

Margaret Thatcher was no longer PM in 1991.  BT were privatized in 1984 before the internet existed.  Ciro was apparently 5 years old then.

The article says we would have been better off if BT, a private company had been allowed to exploit a monopoly situation.  I don't think so.  Any monopoly causes problems. But a private monopoly is almost always a bad thing.

And today, it is trees (forget the broadband, that is sooo yesterday). 

Broadband for all is good but trees are far more important. 

But if for one minute he were a socialist then all that land grabbed by the landed gentry would be taken from them and owned by the workers then covered in trees- where it is possible. 

But he isn't and he wont. 

Right, get off the park. You are substituted. Get Arran back on up front.

Not so disparate really.

The fungal network and the wood wide web...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-44643177/how-trees-secret...

BT were global leaders at the cutting edge of new technology prior to privatisation.

BT started working on the transition to fibre in 1979.

The program began in 1979, and by the mid 80s we were, along with the US and Japan, ahead of the rest of the world in digital communications rollout.

We privatised it in the middle of those efforts, and then decided a few years down the line that the advantages BT had from the work we had put in originally were anti-competitive, and so halted the local loop rollout. 

A private monopoly probably would have been a bad thing in the long run, but there would no such competition concerns had we kept BT public, and therefore there would have been no reason to kill the fibre to the home rollout. 

Had we not privatised, there would have been no reason not to have remained at the forefront of the digital revolution.

​​​

"The story actually begins in the 70s when Dr Cochrane was working as BT's Chief Technology Officer, a position he'd climbed up to from engineer some years earlier.

Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future."

He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward.

"In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.

"In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".

At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.

"Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.

"Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.

"What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.

"This created a very stop-start roll-out which doesn't work with fibre optic - it needs to be done en masse. You needed economy of scale. You could not roll out fibre to the home for 1% of Europe and make it economic, you had to go whole hog.

"It's like everything else in the electronics world, if you make one laptop, it costs billions; if you make billions of laptops it costs a few quid".

Dr. Cochrane would say that, wouldn't he ?    Are you going to believe everything he says ?  There was not any internet or even mobile phones.

I didn’t say they introduced them. Their policies enabled them to flourish. 

^ ^ This.

The current PM has suggested building a bridge from England to Ireland, and Labour have proposed free broadband for the country.

Who get's called the lunatic?

We were leaders in fibre at one stage and we pissed it away.

We're lagging behind most of Europe and we really shouldn't be.

Nope. Read what I wrote please. 
 

Amazon, as far as I am aware, are not a small business. Unless you can enlighten me. 

Thatcher was no longer Prime Minister when the decision to shut the project down was made, but it was her earlier decision that Major and co. implemented.

As for monopolies, infrastructure is often a special case. Hence roads are a state monopoly, as are the railways, after the failure of RailTrack. An argument can be made for the UK internet network as being a special case, as others have said. But can we trust private monopolies? I'm inclined to agree with you there that they're a bad idea. However, in the end what matters most is probably is the strength of regulatory frameworks, especially around standards, investment and profit, and the quality of management. 

"Both are problems created by Labour in the first place." is what you said in regard to the minimum wage and zero-hours contracts.

Yep. They weren’t a problem before as far as I can remember. Zero hours contracts are not a problem it’s when companies use them when they should be managing part time and full time labour properly it becomes a problem. 
 

In the 80s I worked as a temp. I turn up at the agency at 7am. If I got work, I got work, if not I went home and did nothing and got paid nothing. If I wasn’t available for work I didn’t go in. It was very simple and worked very well thanks. 
 

As I remember, one of the problems was that some companies expected workers to be on-site but not paid for large parts of their shift. That's one thing Blair and co. did do - legislate against that. I do agree they could have done more.

BT did a lot of damage. They wanted total control. New technology threatened that. So they tried to suppress new technology or control it.  Landline telephones were their business. They wanted to keep it.

During and after the war we advanced quickly in radio and radar.  By the 1960's the factories that made wireless sets for tanks and aircraft had switched to develop and manufacture mobile radio systems for police, ambulance, fire, and taxi.  In the 1970's I was a designer at Pye in Cambridge.  We were the biggest and best in the world.  BT saw mobile radio as a threat.  I wanted to make mobile phones.  BT didn't want that.  But Pye didn't want that either.  They thought they had a nice safe monopoly, and  new technology might give someone else a go.  Mobile phones were imported.  Pye was dead.

I don't think it can be argued that  he is wrong in practical terms.

We agree private monopolies are bad.  But regulatory frameworks are very much a problem too.  BT used to create the regulatory framework.  It advised, and lobbied, and bribed, to get a framework that increased its power and profit, and most importantly restricted innovation.

youtube.com/watch?v=_gK6k5uxGMg&

Marcus's channel covers a lot of SpaceX stuff.  They've just launched more.  

Interesting stuff

Two more Starlink launches scheduled this year alone.  They’re using used heavily first stages and used fairings for the launches so they’re probably the cheapest satellite launches in history.  Fast forwards a year and they’ll be selling low latency gigabit internet to every location on Earth including the poles.  I don’t think it’s hyperbole to posit that this could dwarf SpaceX’s current revenues and make Musk the richest person in the world; what’s even better is their plan to pour the revenue into making space access even cheaper still.

It’s nice that some people are still innovating the future into existence.

Regulatory frameworks are difficult but not impossible. Much depends on the political will of the government, and its ideological underpinnings. 

I was given a demo of the internet in use in 1982-3 and that term was used

yes, but you can hardly compare the Pye technology in the C12 with the likes of the Larkspur range

The C12 looks like a practical wireless project inside

You sound like this ...https://www.facebook.com/BritainForAll/photos/a.803829216342819/28331212700...

Considering schools expect children to use the internet for their pupils homework, not just for research but for actually completing their homework!  How can it be fair to expect struggling families, who might we be using food banks to get by, to spend money on internet access?

Surely if a school expects you to use the internet, it should be available for all.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/un-says-internet-access-is-a-human-right-20...

The UN and I agree with you.  

Maintenance requirements.  Though you can get "powder coated" wood which is fine.

I was only joking about Pye - their development of the WS19 was a very timely innovation much needed by the army.

Yep. I think I do. Thanks. 

Too many people seeking to divide to further their own dogma. Not enough trying to solve the actual problems  

Although despite the page claims in their description, they seem to be only picking on right wing policies and anti-Brexit. So actually no, they don’t appear to be doing what they claim. Yet more dogma.

The EU controls the VAT rate we pay on broadband. Currently 20%. So for something that’s a human right, the EU consider it a luxury...

I thought it changed in 2015 so you pay the rate for the country you are in. 

No it doesn't. Do you never check before posting your anti - EU bullsh*t?

The EU sets certain rules for VAT rates, but doesn't prescribe any particular VAT rate for broadband services.

And just because we in the UK (for it is our decision, not the EU's) decide to charge standard rate, doesnt mean it is considered a luxury. That classification went years ago for taxation purposes (1979 actually).

https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-rates/european-vat-rates.html

Yes I do. We set VAT at 20%. This means we must charge 20% but we are allowed to reduce to 15% for certain approved services. Broadband isn’t one of them. 
 

Regardless, if the EU think we should be charging VAT on broadband, it’s not a great indicator that they think it’s a human right like electricity or water.

No anti EU bullshit. Facts. 

1 Jan 2015. 

Just Google for regulation 1042/2013 I wasn't able to link pdf. 

No you don't. Or properly at least. Read the link I posted. The EU states the standard rate must be at least 15%. There are then two lower rates that can be set (three if they existed before accession to the EU)> The UK set the rate for broadband (alongside other electronic communications) at 20%. Not the EU.

If the UK decided to reduce the standard rate of VAT to 15%, the EU would not have a problem with that. We MUST charge a standard rate of 15%, and can reduce that to a minimum of 5% for certain approved goods / services.

One of which is a Vatable supply.........just because its supposedly a "human right" doesnt mean it should be free of tax (of whatever sort). Mind you, there are many many things I would say are higher up the list of human rights than broadband access.......

really?

I was referencing the abolition of the classification of goods for VAT purposes as luxury goods in the UK. which happened in 1979.

In conjunction with previous answer - you are correct; this change came about to get away from the likes of play.com using a UK warehouse to sell CD's in the UK but claiming the tax point as Jersey / Guernsey / some other low tax place. That regulation changed the deemed location of supply.

my reply to Dancing was that he is wrong in saying the EU controls the VAT rate on broadband (whether 20% or not. The member states control their own VAT rates subject to certain minimums set by EU.

So ‘Control’ may have been the wrong word. But I don’t think so, as they can raise and lower it with reference to our base rate. And at the present moment we can’t drop our base rate below 15% and we have to set broadband VAT at our base rate. 
If the EU collectively decide that we can discount by 5% or even set it to zero. That’s fine. If you don’t want to call that controlling, then that’s fine. Let’s call it limit the minimum. 

Just today

Germany has reclassified tampons as "necessary" instead of "luxury", passing legislation to reduce tax placed on menstrual products from 19% to 7% after a brilliant campaign run by activists Nanna-Josephine Roloff and Yasemin Kotra

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/germany-ends-tampon-tax/?utm_sourc...

So it appears you can do what you like

Well, not quite. They’ve dropped them to 7% and the EU require them to pay no less than 5%. So you can’t do ‘what you like’. 
 

Luxury items? Didn’t someone say above it had nothing to do with luxury? 
 

Sonall we have to do is lobby the EU and persuade them that broadband is not a luxury, get them to drop the lower limit to 5% and then lobby parliament and get them to follow suit. 

Alternatively spend about £100bn nationalising it. 
Remember £20bn to finish works. I’m guessing OpenReach at a £1.2bn operating income is worth about £30bn. Then there’s some pension short falls to make up... Then if you’re giving it out free there’s £5bn operating costs a year to cover. So that’s £100bn is going to just about cover the next 10 years. 

Don’t forget Labour’s entire objective is to make the broadband companies more expensive to run, too - the people Labour want to extend broadband access to are either:

a) people who can’t afford it currently, or

b) people who can’t get connected currently. And the reason they can’t get connected is because none of the current companies think it’s cost effective to provide it (otherwise they’d have done it)

Whether it’s a worthwhile social goal or not, it’s definitely going to be costly. 

I have absolutely nothing against the Labour Party or the EU. I just feel that there’s a lot of ideology spun as fact and things are being cherry picked. 
 

Labour are clearly into making big business pay their fair share. The problem is what is fair? Companies like BT run employee share save schemes. Very successfully. This is probably a great example of a co-op or ownership by the workers and something the Labour Party ideology should be actively promoting and supporting. They’ve shot themselves in the foot by crashing these schemes. 
 

Surely a better way of putting money into the workers pockets than taxing companies and doshing out cash and free things. 
 

Instead they trot out expensive nationalising schemes that put control of the money in the governments hands. Get a bonus for working hard? Not in the public sector. Your wage is your wage and your pay rise is the same as the bloke sitting in the seat next to you. 
 

Treating people fairly is great if they all act fairly. 

Your guesswork is again completely out.

Openreach revenue is £5bn, ebitda £2.6bn, operating costs £2.4bn (approx)

https://www.btplc.com/Sharesandperformance/Financialreportingandnews/Quarte...

So on a normal ish ebitda multiple they would be worth anywhere between £12 and £20 bn (subject to the usual proviso that something is only worth what someone is willing to pay).......they would tend towards the lower end of this range as free cash is only £685m in the last year - they are in a capital / investment intensive business.

So over 10 years - purchase £12bn (multiplier of 5), Operating costs £24bn No mention of any pension shortfall contribution in the last accounts. so therefore a cost over 10 years of £36bn. £3.6bn pa cost to provide the entirety of the UK with free broadband......not so bad really.

It still wouldnt be completely free to the end user, as openreach only provide the infrastructure.

So not free like they promised. 

Very little in life is free, if you want the ability to communicate instantly with the world you'll be paying for it one way or another. 

Indeed. Promises like this one are plainly stupid. If he means it will be free at the point of use (in a similar way to the nhs), and paid for out of taxation, then fine. I've no problem with that but would prefer politicians are honest about it!

Edit; i realise using the words "politician" and "honest" in the same sentence is a course of action open to ridicule.......

They don’t invest any capital. BT own everything OpenReach are a service only. Once privatised they’d have to pay service charges for the equipment. 
 

The pensions are held with BT aren’t they?

There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. 
 

I think the undervaluing of the Post Office will be small potatoes compared with the amount of due diligence a Labour government will have to do to make this work. 

Yes they do. £2.1bn in 18/19. See p14 of the link in previous post.

Yup, missed that. Total deficit of c £7bn. Not sure of Openreach's share (but will prob be pro rata to workforce, broadly)

Explain?

This is one of the least sensible nationalisation plans. It wont work.

BT were required by the regulators to separate OpenReach. But due to the complex nature of the business a lot of compromises were made. BT own all the copper and the switches. 
 

I suspect, but don’t know, that the capital investment is in the components that OpenReach require to operate. PCs, Vans, Tools, rather than infrastructure. 
 

Smoke and Mirrors. It’s a private company. There will be all sorts of complex agreements between BT and OpenReach. I’m sure. But I have no idea what they will be and they’ll all be legal and above board, just extremely difficult to separate. It’s been tried already. 
 

It’s nice to actually have a conversation with someone here btw. Thanks. 

yeah, would agree partly at least. The separation of the infrastructure is bloody stupid. If the companies were allowed to actually compete properly, with each other as well as others, we'd all be better off. The licensing and privatisation structure was designed to restrict them in favour of new private entrants in the amrket. The worst form of restriction of competition. Bloody tories....

No, its in the infrastructure thay have been building. They will have capitalised the expenditure incurred building it; it is after all what they use to generate their service revenue from thier customers.

Yup, it is unecessarily complicated, but it can be separated. We accountants can perform wonders, you know!

Nice of you to say so given I started out by picking on your mistakes! Anyway, moving on, I think we should not be rolling out cable / fibre or whatever, we should be spending on the next gen tech.

I’m sure accountants can work wonders with the numbers but think if someone owns something that someone wants to use, that’s all that’s going to happen. Money exchanging hands. Unless the lawyers get involved to create some kind of framework restricting what can be charged, what increases and what level of service is allowed. 
 

That’s where it’ll be a mess. 
 

And I’m still interested in the bad feeling it could protentially create with employees who have heavily invested with BT shares.