The cleverest thing the tories ever did from the Maggie years was to convince the working classes they were a few rungs up the class ladder from where they actually are and with their new found superiorness they could never vote labour as that’s for lefty loonies and working classes, it’s still that way today
Back to broadband. A good explanation of why we need fibre and how Thatcher fucked it up.
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/wo...1990-1224784/2
Because the government buggered it up 30 years ago is not a good reason to let the government have another chance to bugger it up now.
If we really need fibre, we'll pay for fibre. I.e. those of us who think we need it more than whatever else we could buy with that money will spend it on fibre. Why does the government have to do everything?![]()
It was fucked as soon as BT lost it's monopoly and was told it would have to allow competitors access to it's lines. BT knew it could not compete on speed of response with smaller leaner competitors, but at least it could attempt to make them dig up the roads - eg Virgin. It kept the old technology both to reduce cost and to restrict how quickly competitors could move. Why should it incur massive capital spend to benefit competitors?
Ffs - when will people actually stop blaming Thatcher.
Currently, anything over 10/15mbs is fine and dandy for 99.99% of people’s needs.
A state provided service will be shit - it will be rigid, slow to adapt and be abused. Just like all state run things, will be a political pawn time and time again. Costs will be bloated and it will never deliver what was dreamed.
There are far simpler ways to ensure the country keeps pace, and that’s legislature, while leaving private companies to do what they do best, innovate and reduce costs.
imho anything over 2mb is fine, that's enough for streaming tv. Then 5mb for HD and 25mb for 4K.
You'd need to have eleventy two kids to take full advantage of 60mb+ tinternets.
What’s also funny is how many whine on about bloated banker salaries, what about the thousands of staff in the NHS who earn bloated salaries far more, more than double, what the PM earns.
Over 50,000 staff on over £100k+ pa, 37000+ of which are in clinical commissioning groups
1700+ on £200k+
There’s even a handful on over £500k pa
And that’s just the NHS side of their income... plenty also work in private sectors as well. When earning mega bucks, one might think you’d be too busy to have multiple jobs....
Let me guess, all just angels - solely doing it for the benefit of the patients, no waste here to see... move on please.
I remember the same sort of arguments being used when the Intel 80386 with the 80387 co-processor came out - nobody would ever need anything faster for 32 bit processing.
Plus ça change.
Remind me when we had state supplied PCs. I must have missed out....
I remember the GOOD OLD DAYS™ when we had lots of nationalised utilities. It were grand. I only had to wait months (4 months if I remember correctly) to get a telephone connected. I suppose it would have been longer if the telephone line hadn't already been installed for the previous owner of the house.
You couldn't get Openreach to take four months to connect a telephone line these days. They'd do it in a couple of weeks. Where's the fun in that?![]()