[stordoff]

> 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

This is especially frustrating if you have a line that's directly connected to an exchange - you don't even benefit from the FTTC upgrades. Download-wise I can't complain too much - ~20Mbps is fine most of the time (though with family members that tend to leaving streaming video running constantly and various game consoles that auto-update almost constantly it's not ideal), but the sub-1Mbps upload speed is terrible. If I've anything large to upload, it's usually faster to take it to my grandparents' house - connected to the same exchange, but get a order of magnitude greater upload speeds because they are connected via a cabinet.

> (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)

Reminds me a story my granddad told me from the 60s/70s (not sure exactly when it was). They'd just finished constructing a new road, laid all the conduits under the road for the various utilities, left them plainly labelled (IIRC it was also pre-planned with the companies, but not certain).... then came back two weeks later to find multiple utility companies had dug up parts of the road to lay their own and done a rough job of patching it back up. He was (understandably) less than impressed!