8 ms·

BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories e

by nyreed 10mo ago

BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance. That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades. Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, who develops the technology?

panick21_ 10mo ago
Do you have some source on this, sounds interesting. It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.
- FreezingKeeper 10mo ago
  https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
qcnguy 10mo ago
It was that kind of delusional decision making that justified the privatization in the first place. Rolling out fiber nationwide in a world where the web had only just been invented and everywhere else in the world was connected via modems would have been catastrophically expensive and supplied bandwidth nobody would have been able to use. The idea the internet could have skipped straight from 33kbaud to fiber speeds is idiotic to anyone who remembers the state of the internet at that time. Most servers were not connected to the internet via fiber.
- n4r9 10mo ago
  Unwittingly a brilliant demonstration of how short-term capitalistic behaviour hamstrings society. Japan, Korea and Hong Kong are way ahead of the UK and much of Europe precisely because of the lack of insight and vision reflected in your post.
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    Ahead in what sense? More successful internet startups or tech economy? I don't think so, but that's how such buildouts were pitched as justified.
    - n4r9 10mo ago
      Ahead in internet speed...
      - qcnguy 10mo ago
        Which is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself... UAE has higher median home bandwidth than the USA but nobody is claiming UAE has somehow uniquely benefited from that.
        n4r9 10mo ago
        You're not making much sense. Faster internet speeds are obviously good for society, all other things being equal.
        qcnguy 10mo ago
        No they aren't. I don't buy the fastest internet available to me because it costs a lot more and none of my computers would be able to use it without special upgrades. If I did for some reason upgrade, nothing would get faster because bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for anything I do, latency is (and latency is mostly server side). Most people are in that situation in the country where I live. FTTH can deliver more bandwidth than there is demand for. I mean, come on. This is HN. Aren't we supposed to be engineers here? Increasing bandwidth only matters if some useful activity is constrained by the lack of it. You can't just say more of X is always a good thing, for any X. Ignoring tradeoffs is the mistake that creates leftism, but there are always tradeoffs.
- mrguyorama 10mo ago
  The private market made the exact same choice in the 90s, but instead of just being something that cost maybe more tax money than it should, it was hyped up and full of lies and marketing and bullshit and burned tons of cash for really stupid projects and caused a serious recession. So..... not really a point for privatization here.
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    The 90s were dominated by modems and around the turn of the millennium DSL connections. Fiber internet (to the home) didn't start until much later. The backbone was getting fiber deployed before then, but there was never some kind of unusual bandwidth crunch in the UK. The private sector managed the rollout just fine.
- joshuaissac 10mo ago
  > Rolling out fiber nationwide [...] would have been catastrophically expensive It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper: > In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper > we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham But the British government was concerned: > 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 > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949 This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors? On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?
  - nyreed 10mo ago
    Hmm, I didn't realise that's why the rollout was stopped. (Which doesn't really make sense as a given reason anyway because wouldn't the fibre just have become part of openreach anyway. So I think new technology is generated through research funding, either public sector (universities) or R&D depts in private companies (today companies like Apple, previously old school companies like pre-Welch GE). I guess BT was more like the latter, except state owned. In telecoms there's also a universal service obligation, which does not make economic sense when driven purely by profit motive. Cost of rolling out fiber to a small village will probably never be recouped. Thats why FTTH w/ Virgin Broadband was only available in cities for a long time, and expensive. In the US where telecoms have regulatory capture, and no public access telecom network, you see stories of rural communities trying to fund their own infra. It's expensive. Cost of rollout and universal service can be helped by rolling out at scale, building the factories, reducing unit price etc. So all this together.... I think private companies _can_ have the foresight to do this kind of forward planning... But a big nationwide rollout of a public good? Where is their financial incentive? They would provide an environment for the acceleration of future commerce and technological development. But if they don't make money from it, why would they?
- elliotto 10mo ago
  I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force? In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.
  - qcnguy 10mo ago
    No. The idea that more bandwidth to the home=generically futuristic economy and outperformance is exactly the kind of bad central planning that makes socialist countries poor! It's the kind of mistake privatization was intended to fix (and did). The Soviets made the same mistake decades earlier when they overbuilt steel mills. The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak. Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.

by nyreed 10mo ago

panick21_ 10mo ago

Do you have some source on this, sounds interesting. It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.

FreezingKeeper 10mo ago
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

qcnguy 10mo ago

It was that kind of delusional decision making that justified the privatization in the first place. Rolling out fiber nationwide in a world where the web had only just been invented and everywhere else in the world was connected via modems would have been catastrophically expensive and supplied bandwidth nobody would have been able to use. The idea the internet could have skipped straight from 33kbaud to fiber speeds is idiotic to anyone who remembers the state of the internet at that time. Most servers were not connected to the internet via fiber.

n4r9 10mo ago
Unwittingly a brilliant demonstration of how short-term capitalistic behaviour hamstrings society. Japan, Korea and Hong Kong are way ahead of the UK and much of Europe precisely because of the lack of insight and vision reflected in your post.
- qcnguy 10mo ago
  Ahead in what sense? More successful internet startups or tech economy? I don't think so, but that's how such buildouts were pitched as justified.
  - n4r9 10mo ago
    Ahead in internet speed...
    - qcnguy 10mo ago
      Which is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself... UAE has higher median home bandwidth than the USA but nobody is claiming UAE has somehow uniquely benefited from that.
      - n4r9 10mo ago
        You're not making much sense. Faster internet speeds are obviously good for society, all other things being equal.
        qcnguy 10mo ago
        No they aren't. I don't buy the fastest internet available to me because it costs a lot more and none of my computers would be able to use it without special upgrades. If I did for some reason upgrade, nothing would get faster because bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for anything I do, latency is (and latency is mostly server side). Most people are in that situation in the country where I live. FTTH can deliver more bandwidth than there is demand for. I mean, come on. This is HN. Aren't we supposed to be engineers here? Increasing bandwidth only matters if some useful activity is constrained by the lack of it. You can't just say more of X is always a good thing, for any X. Ignoring tradeoffs is the mistake that creates leftism, but there are always tradeoffs.
mrguyorama 10mo ago
The private market made the exact same choice in the 90s, but instead of just being something that cost maybe more tax money than it should, it was hyped up and full of lies and marketing and bullshit and burned tons of cash for really stupid projects and caused a serious recession. So..... not really a point for privatization here.
- qcnguy 10mo ago
  The 90s were dominated by modems and around the turn of the millennium DSL connections. Fiber internet (to the home) didn't start until much later. The backbone was getting fiber deployed before then, but there was never some kind of unusual bandwidth crunch in the UK. The private sector managed the rollout just fine.
joshuaissac 10mo ago
> Rolling out fiber nationwide [...] would have been catastrophically expensive It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper: > In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper > we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham But the British government was concerned: > 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 > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949 This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors? On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?
- nyreed 10mo ago
  Hmm, I didn't realise that's why the rollout was stopped. (Which doesn't really make sense as a given reason anyway because wouldn't the fibre just have become part of openreach anyway. So I think new technology is generated through research funding, either public sector (universities) or R&D depts in private companies (today companies like Apple, previously old school companies like pre-Welch GE). I guess BT was more like the latter, except state owned. In telecoms there's also a universal service obligation, which does not make economic sense when driven purely by profit motive. Cost of rolling out fiber to a small village will probably never be recouped. Thats why FTTH w/ Virgin Broadband was only available in cities for a long time, and expensive. In the US where telecoms have regulatory capture, and no public access telecom network, you see stories of rural communities trying to fund their own infra. It's expensive. Cost of rollout and universal service can be helped by rolling out at scale, building the factories, reducing unit price etc. So all this together.... I think private companies _can_ have the foresight to do this kind of forward planning... But a big nationwide rollout of a public good? Where is their financial incentive? They would provide an environment for the acceleration of future commerce and technological development. But if they don't make money from it, why would they?
elliotto 10mo ago
I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force? In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.
- qcnguy 10mo ago
  No. The idea that more bandwidth to the home=generically futuristic economy and outperformance is exactly the kind of bad central planning that makes socialist countries poor! It's the kind of mistake privatization was intended to fix (and did). The Soviets made the same mistake decades earlier when they overbuilt steel mills. The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak. Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.