How will Ofcom reduce our reliance on BT if it won't break them up? The publication of Ofcom’s 2005 Strategic Review of Telecoms was preceded by many long evenings of intense debates within Ofcom and with BT and other stakeholders. The review took 18 months and resulted in the UK having the most competitive broadband market in the world. It’s worth remembering why that happened – because Ofcom …
It's definitely badly written - it reads as though it's a transcript of a speech (maybe it is). If my university tutor had caught me writing "firstly" in an essay she'd have given me a proper slap. But we can make allowances for engineers, and for MPs who don't have an office of taxpayer-funded underlings to proofread their contributions... oh.
I don't know enough about the state of UK broadband to judge the content of this article, but one point caught my eye: "Ofcom says it will open up BT’s ducts, but that was supposed to happen in 2009". My understanding was that Ms. Onwurah was elected in 2010; was she still Head of Telecoms Tech at Ofcom in 2009?
Ofcom says it will open up BT’s ducts, but that was supposed to happen in 2009....And it did happen. It goes by the amusingly ironic name of PIA.
And unsurprisingly it didn't work. A bit worrying if (former) senior officials at the useless Ofcom can't see why this wouldn't work. It is difficult, if not impossible to have genuine, economically viable competition in network infrastructure. For a few trunk/transmission links yes, but for last mile (even last twenty miles) it simply can't be done. That's why 99.9% of us have only one electricity connection, one gas connection, one water connection, one sewerage connection. Even where it has been tried, in cable, the result has been years of losses and large asset writedowns, so that Virginmedia's owners never paid the true cost of the network they now own.
There is an answer, and most people (other than the dimbulbs of government, regulator, and now Her Majesty's Comedy Opposition) can see that: The establishment of Openreach as a separate legal entity to BT, strong and effective regulation (not by the drips of Ofcom), and some degree of legal commitment to USO and a commitment to slowly upgrade to FTTP.
Some will say that the FTTP and USO costs will be too high. How, then, did we afford to get electricity and water to just about anybody who wants it, even in our relatively impoverished past? There's other solutions to digging trenches or erecting poles everywhere. But as set up, BT simply can't be arsed, and Ofcom couldn't even find its own arse.
How would separating Openreach help? I can absolutely understand how it's highly attractive to BT's rivals, purely to inflict gratuitous damage on a competitor, but I don't see how it actually helps with the challenges of improving connectivity.
Re. cost, haven't you answered your own question: historically, Government paid for universal electricity and gas connections, and/or the incumbent suppliers were permitted to charge whatever necessary to recoup the costs from other customers. There isn't, I suggest, the appetite for either nowadays: taxpayers and urban customers would howl if either were pillaged to fund rural connectivity. Even your examples aren't complete, provision wasn't universal: try getting mains gas in a remote village, and see how far your cries about 'entitlement' and 'unfairness' get you. There are three options for investment:
1. Government-funded through general taxation.
2. Customer-funded by imposing excess charges on urban customers to subsidise rural customers.
3. Industry-funded, with long payback times (decade+), and regulation to prevent communications providers from clawing the money back from existing customers (otherwise this would be Option 2).
No communications providers other than BT have shown any appetite for (2) or (3). What does this tell you about the technical and commercial credibility of those advocating an magical FTTP Nirvana?...
How would separating Openreach help?
Because where Openreach isn't separate from BT, the regulator has to rely on management accounts. By their definition, management accounts are a sub set of the statutory accounts, and tell a very selective and incomplete story. That's why any competent regulator (for example, OFWAT) are red hot on ring fencing regulated business from non-regulated commercial business, and then the regulate the operation of said monopoly in a very detailed and transparent way.
Now, Ofcom are as bold, brave and effectual as wet lettuce, but that's a separate problem. If we could see Openreach's accounts as a standalone company, along with regulatory detail that establishes what it trades with BT group and proves that BT trades at arms length with Openreach, then you'd have the basic facts on which to regulate the operation.
But, there's a reason why BT opposes any form of separation, ring fencing, or split off of Openreach, and that's not to serve customers better.
"How, then, did we afford to get electricity and water to just about anybody who wants it, even in our relatively impoverished past?"
Gradually. I grew up in a rural house that initially didn't have mains water (actually when we got it we still preferred the spring for drinking water anyway) nor electricity until after we left in 1958.
We're looking at a copper network that was installed over decades. Replacing that with FTTP would be a huge investment. Deciding who'll do that is secondary to finding the money. As you point out the cable installers lost money even though they were able to cherry pick the compact high density urban areas. Then there's the rate at which such a replacement might take happen; and hence working out how large a workforce might be or could be assembled for the task, how many roads could be dug up simultaneously etc.
And now we have muppets thinking that all it takes to roll out FTTP to the whole country is the right wording in an OFCOM report.
El Reg has previously quoted Ms Onwurah, in respect of the FTTP push that she once again advocates in this piece - and just as then, the same problems crop up here.
Expecting BT to wholesale walk away from the copper in the ground and hanging from the poles is simply unrealistic and uneconomical. It smacks of the old punch line "Well if I wanted to get there I wouldn't start form here!"
The copper exists - and at the last count it connected however many millions of premises to cabinets on the street or exchanges. Advocating a wholesale rip and replace beggars belief. It also advocates an approach that if followed would once again see the focus return to larger urban areas with higher population densities.
I would have been more impressed had Ms Onwurah, advocated for technologies such as the G.Fast specification. While accepting that it is not without issue, delivery speeds in the 150Mb range are the target and these over final drops of up to 250m.
As I look at the pole serving our house, I see that it also serves 5 others. It's that sort of scenario, where one set of modifications benefit multiple properties that will been to be found if superfast broadband is to happen fairly and speedily across the country in the next 5/10 years
And it will also require that opinion pieces fairly target all providers. Everyone seems to accept that competition is a good thing - but the competition that we get with Sky/Plusnet sitting on BT wires pales into insignificance when compared to Virgin running cable into a street. Unless Virgin and their ilk are compelled to take their services further afield then this talk of superfast high speed broadband will remain just that - talk.
"As I look at the pole serving our house, I see that it also serves 5 others. It's that sort of scenario, where one set of modifications benefit multiple properties that will been to be found if superfast broadband is to happen fairly and speedily across the country in the next 5/10 years"
Are you really advocating a new FTTP (Fiber To The Pole), is it just you can't be arsed to go the last 10 yards? Or is the last 10 yards the same excuse as connecting the last 10% to whatever we have (mandated) now?
"Are you really advocating a new FTTP (Fiber To The Pole), is it just you can't be arsed to go the last 10 yards? Or is the last 10 yards the same excuse as connecting the last 10% to whatever we have (mandated) now?"
The closer you get to the premises the more it costs. The only economic way to do this is to inch ever closer.
Once you go into those five houses you'll find that; 1 has a burglar alarm that needs a copper pair to work, 1 has no electricity socket near the existing phone socket to power the NTU, 2 don't want faster broadband and the last house will be fine.
Multiply the difference in time and cost between one pole and five houses across the several tens of millions of buildings and you'll see the problem.
"The closer you get to the premises the more it costs. The only economic way to do this is to inch ever closer."
G.Fast sucks power like a government minister at a troughfest - at BOTH ends of the link.
GPON and friends are miserly by comparison, which means that you can actually afford to have on-premises battery backup on it that might last more than half an hour.
By the time you're up the pole, you might as well sling the last 50 metres and be done with it. A properly installed aerial fibre will last at least 50-60 years and you don't have problems with corroded joints.
@AC
As you asked - then yes - I really am advocating Fibre to the Pole. Take 20 million homes on copper as a finger in the air number. 20 Million site visits to change out the terminations in those homes - versus between 3 and 4 million Pole installations.
That last stretch on copper - as others have pointed out, it may be required for other purposes. Power beside the phone socket? Not always guaranteed.
And athough G.Fast is officially only spec'd to 150Mb, it has been pushed faster.
I'm advocating something that provides a significant step increment for a fraction of the cost. There may well be scenarios where multi Gbit broadband is required - but to be totally blunt 150Mb would suit this household just fine.
One of the other commentards linked to a very good article on the expense of running full FTTH - read it. It's not so much the cost as the sheer numbers of engineers that are required to roll this out in a timely manner.
I remember the days when they told us that copper would never carry above 2Mb - and it's already running at up to 40 time that in the right circumstances with the potential to go faster yet.
As and when the copper drop to the house degrades and needs replacing, it should then be an option to have it replaced with fibre
I don't see why it is so necessary to throw the baby out with the bath water.
I appreciate and am more than happy with extending our little community to people outside the core tech industry, and I find some of the contributions brilliant (that one from the Lib Dem Baron/Lord/I forget :( ) was superb.
Part of the thing that made his superb was the fact that he didn't make it political, I've always viewed the Reg as a politics free zone and it's one of the things that's kept me coming back. This reads like a party political broadcast written by a petulent child in crayon.
There were some very good points in there, but they were drowned under "Conservatives did this, which meant that our glorious leaders plans to do that were undone" blah blah bloody blah.
Let the politicians in by all means, all of them from all parties have many valid points to make and on the whole I like reading their articles. But tell them to leave the politics at the door because if I wanted to read political spiel I'd look at the Daily Mail or the Guardian depending on what mood I felt like that day.
***Edited to add - I believe you're all supposed to shout "Hear Hear" or jeer at me like a child now from what I've seen on BBC Parliament. ***
> There were some very good points in there, but they were drowned under "Conservatives did this, which meant that our glorious leaders plans to do that were undone" blah blah bloody blah.
Indeed, it didn't go long before making (factually incorrect) pot shots. One that stood out was "Google and Facebook are criticised – rightly – for not paying taxes on revenues equivalent to the GDP of some countries".
For a politician to have such a poor grasp of really really basic tax principles is rather a poor show. Firstly, no business* pays tax on turnover - they pay tax on profit. Secondly, it's allowed for business to offset costs* against their income to work out a taxable profit. And thirdly, it's accepted internationally that profits are taxed where they are earned.
Our very own HMRC grilled Google for 10 years and only found minor issues in the tax they paid on profits earned in the UK. They grilled Vodafone for some time before agreeing that Vodafone didn't owe much tax on profits earned in the UK.
* There is now an exception in that the clueless f**kwit in No 11 has decided that those in the business of putting a roof over someone's head should be taxed on turnover and not profit. In a clear act of political point scoring, he's directly responsible for putting rents up for a lot of tenants, and the measures are already in the early stages of a judicial revue for breaches of human rights law and (IMO) more importantly illegal state aid as they explicitly give a tax advantage to a select class of businesses.
The article overlooks the financial and practical issues involved which maybe isn't a surprise for an MP. There's an attempt here by someone with a great deal of knowledge and experience to look at the costs and practicalities of FTTP. It's quite depressing.
"So with an engineering team 19 times bigger at Openreach, in four years working at the same rate they would passed 855,000 premises with FTTH, or if they had started in 2009 we would have 1.5 million FTTH premises passed. Of course to scale this up to a roll-out that matches the VDSL2 footprint of 23 to 24 million premises, it is not a simple multiplier as the number busy dealing with existing copper issues will remain static, so lets assume around half the Openreach staff are involved in the FTTH roll-out and the rest are doing the usual faults and installs. Scaling this up Openreach would need an extra 130,000 staff with an annual wage bill of £2.6 billion to have kept pace (Openreach engineer starting salary is in the £19,000 to £21,000 region, and we have ignored the extra costs of training, fleet vehicles etc for this simple projection)."
The Civic Code, 1995 as amended, provides that no person or thing shall impede the installation of communication facilities provided by a registered communications company.
Access, easement and landlords/condominiums can present a challenge, especially when the latter two have been paid bribes to dissuade the competition from entering their property.
The only costs that can be made are to restore 'damage' caused by the installation.
And it works.
I have a condominium in a new building in Ho Chi Minh City/SaiGon where the 'appropriate' bribes had been paid. The management was so stupid to put in writing that it had been paid an 'exclusivity fee' to deny others access.
When their lawyers were appraised of the statute, the condominium 'acquiesced', and agreed that it was open season. My lawyer 'chatted' to my ISP of choice and the very next week it's squaddies were pulling in fibre optic cable. In the following three weeks four other communications companies were pulling in fibre.
There are approximately 1,000 residences in our group of buildings and fastest offerings max out at 100 Mbytes the lowest being 15 Mbytes. They also offer voice and TV over fibre.
So let OFCOM remove the stranglehold of BT on the 'last mile/kilometre of copper' so England can achieve operating parity with Third World or Developing countries!
BT has code powers in the UK but they are still subject to planning consent from local councils. Another problem they face is getting power to their cabinets. That can involve considerable expense and lengthy delays while waiting for the local grid operator to wire the cab up.
The biggest problem BT faces is the existing network. I'm sure most of us as readers of this site are aware of the cost and hassle of dealing with legacy systems. Well BT is dealing with a huge nation-wide legacy system. Even worse the legacy system does a damn' good job at what it was designed for and a not-too-bad job at what we now want from it. Scrapping or deprecating the UK's copper local loop just doesn't make financial sense. It is still a huge asset. It's like that wonderful VMS server in the basement that just keeps chugging along day after day, year after year doing what is asked of it. You'll never get the CFO to sign off on replacing it.
"That can involve considerable expense and lengthy delays while waiting for the local grid operator to wire the cab up."
Not with GPON fiber to premise, they gave themselves the headache of getting power to street cabs as part of their fillibuster over copper, rather than deploying fibre from the exchange to the cabinet with a passive splitter and then duct or airiel drops to houses/businesses.
Not with GPON fiber to premise
True, but they didn't have that option. FTTC is a compromise derived from the realities of the situation. Have you not read that Thinkbroadband article? If BT had gone straight to FTTP they'd be nowhere near finished yet. Forget arguing over the last 5% in 2016. I doubt we'd even be at 50% coverage yet.
BT is trying to deploy G.Fast - which is as disruptive as having to run FTTP anyway (plus it needs power all along the street ducts plus having to deal with steadily rotting copper, etc)
The advantange from BT's point of view is that it can charge 100%+ of the equipment cost up front plus rentals, which it can't with GPON (being infrastructure, it has to be recovered over a 20 year period)
"So let OFCOM remove the stranglehold of BT on the 'last mile/kilometre of copper' so England can achieve operating parity with Third World or Developing countries!"
there is no stranglehold - anyone can offer a telecoms service in the UK. Virgin's network reaches over half of UK homes.
What isn't so easy is reaching people outside of towns and cities. It's technically trivial but it is expensive.
"So let OFCOM remove the stranglehold of BT on the 'last mile/kilometre of copper' so England can achieve operating parity with Third World or Developing countries!"
An idiotically uninformed comment. Any telecommunication company with code powers (which pretty well means any vaguely credible network company who wants it) can install any network they like to any property. There are some issues with exclusivity deals by landlords, but absolutely none of those are with providing networks in competition to BT. The problem is simply one of cost and logistics.
"Ofcom says quite clearly it will promote a large scale rollout of fibre to the premises for businesses and households. That chimes with what we have been saying in the Labour Party, that fibre has to be our destination, copper cannot be our future. Who knows maybe now the Minister will actually answer my questions on fibre instead of only referring generically to “fixed communications”."
Why is this? I don't see the output of any logic here.
Sweating an existing asset is the economically most efficient thing to do. Faster broadband is cheaper if it's delivered by enhancing an existing copper network. A full on fibre rollout from scratch would take decades and cost tens of billions of pounds. The market expectation around price doesn't support the costs of providing the service.
Wireless broadband gets better on a regular basis and the price of broadband continues to fall. It would be an exceptionally brave (i.e. daft) CFO who approved a massive FTTP rollout in such a risky environment.
It doesn't matter who owns Openreach as long as its run on commercial lines they have to worry about competition rules, have to be careful about cross subsidies, have to make some sort of profit and the cash to put fibre into every home would have to come from somewhere. Now we're slowly edging there with FTTC and now G.Fast. However to do the last 10% will cost more than the other 90%. It will never commercially even come close to breaking even, you goto the market looking to borrow billions more than you make each year and say we want to borrow this money and spend it on something that we wont even be able to cover the cost of it and you'll get laughed out of the door.
The unpalatable options are :-
1) Slowly keep creeping fibre closer to homes(Works for 70% of the population mainly in towns and cities)
2) Massive government subsidies for rural areas.
3) Ofcom to agree increases in openreach charges so that money can be reinvested in rural areas. Two problems its anti competative as it decreases the incentives for other people to compete in those areas and customers would be up in arms if say £5 to £10 a month was added onto combined bills.
4) Tell rural people they will have to pay for roll out of fibre to there communities. I cant see many people in rural communities accepting being told they have to each pay £10,000 to deliver fibre to there homes.
I'm not sure that BT Openreach is being anti-competitive.
Sky et al don't really don't have a leg to stand on as they've been around for long enough to have started building their own infrastructure - the fact that they haven't would seem to indicate that they are actually happy for BT Openreach to be the only provider in town!
Yes, even Vodafone with it's ownership of C&W and the remains of Mercury - the whole reason we had a duopoly back in the 1980's, hasn't really done very much infrastructure building. Leaving Virgin as the only credible alternative, and they use BT for their telephony. [Aside: Yes, I know I'm ignoring the smaller players, who to my mind do have legitimate grievances with the current arrangements.]
So it would seem that the majors in the industry are actually quite happy to have a monopoly infrastructure provider; just that they don't like that provider being able to also sell to consumers...
Hence Ofcom rather than sabre rattle about competition should in fact simply acknowledge the truth of the situation and tell Sky, TalkTalk et al that they should be doing as per the government and be investing in BT Openreach, plus put say 1 GPB pcm on to Openreach's prices, with these monies being earmarked for access network upgrades ie. building capacity and capability - just like Ofwat does for water and Ofgen for gas/electricity...
What is clear we (as a country and users) have a poorer comm's infrastructure because of the interference of Westminster and their agent (OFCOM) in the market since the 1980's...
> It doesn't matter who owns Openreach as long as its run on commercial lines they have to worry about competition rules, have to be careful about cross subsidies, have to make some sort of profit and the cash to put fibre into every home would have to come from somewhere.
Indeed. But the big problem which OfCon have kicked off down the road for someone else to deal with later is that BTOR isn't truly separate in it's accounts. Yes it is, in theory, completely separate - but only by "management accounts". Thus by being creative with account practices, they can do all sorts of things - effectively hiding issues like cross subsidies, and also very important, hiding different interfaces (eg BT getting preferential treatment even though it's not allowed).
But even if you solved that, as long as BTOR is owned completely by BT, then any decisions it makes will be the ones BT want it to make - and that means they will be ones that support BT's dominance.
Anyone actually know the cost of FTTH per drop banded for rural, urban and city?
I'm astounded Ms. Onwurah could have been head of telecom tech (sounds like a non job) at ofcom as she obviously lacks any knowledge of telecom tech. The comms traffic has to traverse copper somewhere, either at the server, aggregation switch, uplink to the router, router to nte, in the customers home from the fibre nte to the cpe?
My vm lowest tier 70mb downlink BB is more than adequate for our needs. The uplink needs to be faster though. Despite vm's adds This is effectively on a FTTC network, the last gasp is coax, not fibre. Copper is very far from dead as it's super easy to run radio frequencies down it, which is how BB transmits it's digital signal, over lots of high frequency channels. VM are now trialing radio over fibre, to truly replace the last meters of coax with fibre. While the kit is more expensive than copper equivalents, the signal maintains better quality over long runs and it's far easier to keep boosting the signal over very long runs with cheap amplifiers, the alternative being to regenerate each bit with more sophisticated expensive kit. RFOF is VM's answer to GPON. While GPON separates each customers stream of light during transmission to the exchange RFOF combines them where possible.
OFCOM should make VM open their network to rivals too, and ensure they, sky, talk talk etc are also obliged to undertake USO too. I'm sure they'd quickly form a coalition to share costs if that undertaking.
OFCOM should make VM open their network to rivals too
I'm sure Sky, Vodafone, Talktalk are quite capable of holding negotiations with VM. However, I suspect they have probably already discovered that Virgin are just as hard-nosed as BT and would want to charge a commercial rate for the usage of their network, and decided that it is easier to go with BT as then they can wave the Ofcom stick...
Then perhaps it's time for the OFT to step in.
This is a commercial matter at least as much as a telecommunications one and Ofcom's reluctance to take action mirrors the ineffectuality of the New Zealand regulator before the govt finally had enough and stepped in.
Making any further govt broadband money conditional on openreach being an entirely separate company is the logical way forward. It worked in New Zealand and it would work well here.
(The lines company is regulated and must offer equal access to all, etc. The point is that without the dead hand of BT head office acting as a handbrake, Openreach becomes truely free to sell what it wants to whom it wants - including duct access to Virgin, etc etc. - This has resulted in the NZ version of Openreach becoming a vibrant company whilst the old mothership (BT retail/wholesale, etc) is looking decidely shaky)
A village I used to live in built its own fixed antenna wifi system. Not a normal wifi mesh, a proper setup with rooftop antennae and CPEs connecting to MIMOs on masts, on the 5.8Ghz spectrum. For the cost of £26 a month per household we were getting 15mbit symmetric at peak times, with sustained bursts at 60mbit symmetric during the night. THIS WAS FIVE YEARS AGO.
A lot of small communities including some very rural spots could have serviceable broadband by using dark fibre / community fibre, with an outlay of no more than £5,000 for the kit to get started. In theory 65mbits/sec should be perfectly feasible for £30/month. Of course, when the politicians looked into dealing with notspots they completely ignored this option.
You are lucky, it seems that BT have something of a history of telling people "sorry, no fast broadband for you - not economic", then when it looks like something else will step in, they'll announce that "actually we will be providing service soon". "Soon" seems to be flexible - if the alternative suppliers pull out (can't compete if BT take most of their customers) then "soon" can stretch out a bit.
Not too far from me is such a community project http://b4rn.org.uk
They have tales of some of the villages they serve suddenly going from "never" to "soon" once BT found out about the competition's plans. As far as I can see, it seems to be doing alright, and they have another project on to go west from Lancaster http://www.b4ys.org.uk - though as one of our customers (who would love it, and could contribute being a land owner) puts it, "I don't think they've realise how much rock there is".
Sayeth she.... "It’s worth remembering why that happened – because Ofcom made the “access” network – the copper to peoples’ homes – open to different providers. That led to competition which drove down prices as well as spurring investment in equipment and new service bundles."
Oh aye? Did it? Really? - And that's the official Stadt-approved verision of history we're all safe to regurgitate is it?
It wasn't that part of something that my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents generations built and fought for, and that I was due to inherit partial ownership of that was stripped away and given away to corporate fat-cats who then proceded to carve the good bits off leaving only the bare bones and some rotting flesh which they continue to suck the life out of? - Because having lived through the period that's actually what I remember...
And I'm not sure that more than three decades on I should be all that impressed by the sub-zero-point-five-meg broadband (average about 0.4 downlink) I have in a location that is within sight of Edinburgh Castle and the Forth Bridges (i.e. NOT a particularly rural or remote area) ... Or the cost of calls... Or anything else much about the raggle-taggle collection of two-bit parasites I've the 'choice' of doing 'business' with if I want to keep a basic essential service...
Personally I don't struggle "to imagine life without megabit connectivity"... That's just reality and is likely to remain so until I move somewhere else. And it strikes me that the main reason for this is the infrastructure has been pretty-much left to rot. - But then why wouldn't it be really? When the main purpose of 'business' is to extract as much as possible from a cash-cow customer base whilst minimising the cost of doing so in order the channel profits into the pockets of a few.
Increasing the number of sharks that infest these shallow and restricted waters isn't going to improve or change that...
As for the self-serving rhetoric of Ms Onwurah in respect of the current government's ill-considered and undoubted failures... The reality is that the Labour party she serves will do nothing different. If she is (for instance) really concerned about the plight of benefit claimants unable to access all-online services, then why isn't she arguing for basic core-provision to all households at little or no cost? Something similar stands if she's concerend about the connectivity of small businesses (and by that I mean the Butcher the Baker and the Candle-Stick Maker as opposed to the government/politico definition of a 'small business' which is turnover exceeding £1.6Million!).
Why isn't she arguing for a state provider that operates a limited basic service at minimal cost on a not-for-profit basis? - Let the 'commercial' companies provide the high end stuff and help subsidise the bare bones... Rhetorical questions of course!
With not a fag-paper's distance between 'shadow' and 'government' ministers it's unsurprising no-one admits that adding the 'overhead' of profit to a service, and then making that a priority over providing the service itself doesn't serve the best-interests of the end user... At least not where the service in question is an essential one and the infrastructure an effective monopoly. And I'm fairly certain that she is not so stupid as to imagine that at a basic level, core national infrastructure can ever be anything other than monopolistic in nature.
In truth "Labour’s commitment to universal broadband for all by 2012" was little more than a few good lunches for selected well-connected stuffed shirts, and is nothing to mourn...
Opening up 'markets' for essential services is quite a different thing from throwing service users to the wolves. When our infrastructure was sold from under us, it was supposed to be up to these 'private companies' to improve upon it and invest... Now that this hasn't really happened governments are basically proposing pouring a little more gravy from the public purse onto those old bones to keep them tasty - but that won't alter the fact that profits come before the service! Or that those profits are largely filling the pockets of the fat-cat public-school cronies.
Frankly Ms Onwurah seems simply to be bemoaning the fact that the entire gravy boat was diverted to BT instead of her particular favourite group of cronies... And that she doesn't have her hand on the spoon... If it were otherwise she'd be arguing to bring the main network under public ownership, charging the private telecoms companies healthy commercial rates to access it, and channelling the profits back 100% into the research and development of that network.
But then that might be a bit 'Socialist' for the 'old boys' and 'gels' of the Labour party...
The past 35 years seem to have seen every social advance that was achieved in the previous 35 years (and beyond) undone. Abdication of responsibility and asset stripping for transient gain seems to be what has defined politics over that period... And it matters not what shade of rogue sits in the big chair. - Political football is a game of sheer unmitigated dishonesty. And the first division is inhabited by some of the most untrustworthy people walking the earth today...
I'd remind the editors of "The Channel" then of that old geek-beloved quote about there being some games where the only winning move is not to play... And suggest that the next time it's offered a skewed-to-buggery piece by some self-serving self-aggrandising political animal they pass on it, and serve up something else. - Maybe something written by someone with sufficient grasp of technical matters that we might reasonably think them capable of fitting a plug to a toaster!
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