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by DaiPlusPlus
3447 days ago
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It's cheap in Lithuania and other countries because they were was no significant prior investment in telecoms infrastructure, and the costs of deployment are generally lower too (cheaper labour, easier planning-permission) - so when it comes to deploying Internet access to a previously disconnected community it only makes sense to roll-out the bleeding-edge technology (e.g. FTTH). Whereas in the UK, BT was/is obsessed with squeezing every last drop of bandwidth from POTS connections - because the cost of upgrading everyone's last-mile connections from copper (or even aluminium in some cases) to fibre is very cost-prohibitive: look at the sheer cost the cablecos shouldered during the mass roll-out of coax in the early-1990s (and even then, it was only to boxes in the street, not houses) - I understand their near-bankruptcy from this move lead to them all coming together under NTL and Telewest, and then Virgin Media. (The only thing that is inexplicable is how even modern, brand-new housing developments still have unshielded copper last-mile connections instead of FTTH: they don't even lay conduits to make it easier for possible future FTTH... idiocy) Give the UK a few more years and there should be a mandate from above requiring FTTH and we'll see progress: maybe even 10Gig FTTH as standard, then the tables will turn and people in Lithuania will be stuck with their 1Gbps service until their next round of major infrastructure investment, potentially decades away. (I'm aware that Fibre is generally more future-proof than copper, and a high-quality fibre line that handles 1Gbps today can easily handle 10Gbps, and potentially 40Gbps or even 100Gbps in the future - so my entire argument may be moot) |
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BT were preparing to do FTTH when I joined them in 1994 (I left in 2001). This was as you say going to be eye-wateringly expensive because BT have a universal provision requirement - they couldn't upgrade the network in the cities and not do it in the countryside. The idea was to pay for this by providing television services, but OfTel (now OfCom) said this would be unfair competition with the cable providers - who were cherry picking cities to make rollout cheaper. They would also have been in competition with Sky, which meant the Murdoch press lobbying against BT (among others; the media market is always a tangle of interests)
Additionally, local-loop unbundling (ie ADSL) was being proposed; BT were required to allow access to the last-mile network from in-exchange equipment, and do this at line rental prices that undercut themselves, in order to break their monopoly. OfTel were very likely to make the same requirement for FTTH/FTTC.
Of course, you pays your money you makes your choice - if BT had been allowed to go ahead with their TV services back then, we might've had FTTH way sooner, but BT probably still would have had a monopoly.
Source: I met the engineers doing FTTH on my first visit to Ipswich, I was part of the team working on the local-loop unbundling ordering systems (where other providers booked engineering time at exchanges) and gave presentations to them at OfTel's offices.