[Gllug] To LLU or Not to LLU?

[Christopher Hunter]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 10:19 +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:

> And you pay rather high taxes in Finland to pay for it.

That might have been true a few years ago, but my British tax burden is
now the highest percentage of my earnings than it ever has been.

>  I like beer and don't really want to find myself in a position where 
> I can't afford it in quantity.
> 

I quite agree!

> The "public purse" is merely a euphemism for taxpayers.

Of course it is, and always was!  

>  Nearly two decades on, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason 
> to fibre up the country given we seem to be doing just fine over copper. 
> It's just an expensive folly, so it would have been sensible to can it.

There are a number of compelling reasons to "fibre up the country" - for
example:  

1.	The coax that's buried in the ground for the cable TV networks was
the very cheapest crap that they could find, and is now rotting. Stuff
they planted just two years ago is already being dug up and replaced.
The price of the recovered copper from the wrecked coax is enough to pay
for much of the fibre replacement.

2.	Telecommunications infrastructure demands ever-increasing bandwidth
as technology "improves".  The only way to service this is to use fibre
- copper just doesn't cut it.

3.	You may be satisfied with your "up to 8 Mb" stupidly slow interweb
connection, but I'm not.  Many of us want proper, fast, reliable 'net
connections, and we're NOT going to get those down twisted copper pairs!

4.	As everything becomes IP-connected (including your fridge), there
will be ever more bandwidth required.  The possibilities in a properly
connected country are astonishing, and we haven't thought of them all
yet!

> Incidentally, there are quite a few properties who have fibre telephone
> service from BT. In a rather amusing twist of irony, there wasn't enough
> bandwidth available on the fibre link, and anybody who wanted broadband had
> to wait for BT to roll out a parallel copper network in the area.

I've never seen that - there is some limited BT "FTTC" (fibre to the
cabinet), and Virgin have their FTTC network (which they persist in
falsely advertising as FTTH (fibre to the home)).  Muswell Hill (where I
live) is the first BT trial area for FTTH, so I'll be able to get
service nearly as good as I do abroad in the next few months.

It appears that BT have decided to take on the only Cable TV company
(Virgin on the ridiculous), and are installing a REAL fibre network -
the cabinets were installed at each end of our road last week.  BT are
offering TV, telephone, interweb and alarm/CCTV monitoring packages at
surprisingly low cost, though I'm still wary of their 'net offering in
view of the "Phorm" debacle.

C.

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