back to article Minister 'C*nt' promises £50m to get fabtastic fibre for all

Culture minister Jeremy Hunt has promised £50m in extra funding to put "a fibre point in every community in the UK by the end of the Parliament". Although he acknowledged that moving the UK from its poor position in world superfast broadband rankings to nearer the top would require a mix of technologies, he said pushing …

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  1. Sceptical Bastard

    I heard it

    Yup, Jim Naughty definitely did a spoonerism and pronounced Hunt with a C. He spoilt it rather by apologising profusely a little later.

    As to the government's announcement, as there is no new cash (just shuffling existing money around) and as previous targets have proved more aspirational then actual, I hold out little hope of the UK ever having the "best broadband in Europe". Hunt's glib assurances are unlikely to become reality.

    So I'm not sure why Naughtie felt the need to apologise - like most of our political overlords Jeremy is a c*nt.

    1. LinkOfHyrule
      Coat

      Jeremy

      Hunt by name, c*nt by nature.

    2. Blofeld's Cat
      Headmaster

      Spoonerism?

      I'm not sure that really was a Spoonerism, it was more of a Freudian Slip.

      Now if Naughtie had described C|Hunt as a "Shining Wit", then that would definitely have been a Spoonerism.

      1. Cunningly Linguistic
        Headmaster

        You picked the wrong two words

        The words he said, directly after Hunt was "Culture Secretary". So the relevant words were "Hunt Culture", though he stopped before fucking up "Culture".

        1. Captain TickTock
          Pint

          He should have carried on...

          ...for maximum plasuaible deniability

          Buy the man a beer, in the hope of more ;-)

    3. nickrw

      Re: I heard it

      I fail to see the spoonerism though, that'd be "Heremy Junt" surely? What Jim did was more of a saysitlikeiseesitism.

    4. Steven Jones
      FAIL

      Not a Spoonerism

      Heremy Junt or Juremy Hent are Spoonerisms. This was not. Such a slip involves transposition of the first element of two words. I suspect I far more likely explanation is that this is the unconscious carrying over of editorial room banter into the live programme, or what if commonly known as a Freudian Slip.

      James Naughty has previous on this. In 2005, in an interview with Ed Balls, he asked "If we win the election" and then corrected himself to "if you win".

      http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/archives/JamesNaughtieWinningtheElec.mp3

      1. Number6

        Hunt the Culture Secretary

        I think he got Hunt and Culture confused.

      2. Matt_V
        Go

        Spoonerism...

        Jeremy Hunut, Culture Secretary....

    5. Chris Miller

      Definitely Spooner at work here

      Jeremy Hunt, Minister for Culture - just transpose the C and H. This is more likely to happen because they're both followed by the letter u (according to some Prof who contacted Today after the event).

  2. Semaj
    FAIL

    sfdgdfg

    I'll believe it when I see it.

    What's the chances that BT will happily take the £50m and spend it on consultants and putting new fibre down in areas like London, which already have it, ignoring any non-city location.

    1. Mike Shepherd

      Would you be happy, very happy, less happy or about as happy if...

      I concur: the article mentions "...£50m in funding for...market tests...".

      Market tests? Is this phoning 100 random people and asking "Would you like faster broadband?" and "Would you pay an extra £10 / £20 / £30 a month?".

      The answer to the first question is always "yes". The answer to the second is always a lot more than people will actually pay when it comes to reaching into their pocket.

      1. Steven Jones
        FAIL

        Confusing Market Research with Market Test

        You are mixing up market tests with market research. Market tests normally involve a small/medium scale piloting of a products, typically in a defined target area. As it is a market, and not a technology test (or trial), then it will usually involve charging for the product and looking at such things as take-up rates and processes.

        But since when did bothering to find out what the terms mean stop anybody commenting on it?

        1. annodomini2
          Thumb Up

          Yup

          In his local constituency no less

    2. Elmer Phud

      Not BT

      "second wave testing of market tests for superfast broadband from May next year - local groups have until April to propose new tests."

      It means that there will be £50 spent on advertising that HM.Gove is spending money on asking about asking about fibre.

      It won't get as far as BT, HM.Gove will spend it on medal polishing.

  3. Chris Miller

    Simples

    All you have to do is persuade a substantial proportion of the population to move into huge apartment complexes. As long as most Brits remain fixated on owning at least 3 of the 4 walls surrounding us, it will be an order of magnitude more costly to deliver FTTH than it is in S Korea or many other countries were apartment-living is the norm.

    Of course, it's easy to wire up a block of flats to a 1Gb fibre and claim everyone has high-speed broadband. For myself, I'd rather have an 8Mb link that delivers a genuine 8Mb 24x7 than a nominally 100Mb connexion that slows to a crawl when all the kids get home from school.

    PS Jeremy Hunt talked of his programme creating 'up to' 600,000 new jobs - anyone have a clue where these might be coming from?

    1. LinkOfHyrule
      Joke

      Dunno

      "PS Jeremy Hunt talked of his programme creating 'up to' 600,000 new jobs - anyone have a clue where these might be coming from?"

      Dunno? Phorm operators? Phorm installation engineers? Phorm advertising sales department?

    2. zebthecat

      @Chris Miller

      He thought these new jobs would appear in online shopping.

      Quite why you need a 1GB line to use online shops is a bit of a mystery.

      He also said that BBC is helping to pay because of iPlayer demand.

      Why stop there eh? Using his logic than all online businesses should help pay for the new infratructure.

      The man is an idiot as well as a *unt

    3. Big-G

      Why shopping of course

      ..next time, pay attention to the minister, numpty!

    4. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      600,000 new jobs

      Someone had to dig those trenches to lay all the new fibre... not quality, knowledge worker jobs.

      If only Virgin offered their 50 Mbit/s offering to business customers and domestic customer rates, they might attract a lot of small limited companies (i.e. 1 / 2 person consultancies use by contractors).

      1. annodomini2
        Headmaster

        Ah but...

        It never states those are individual 'permanent' positions only 'jobs', which can also be interpreted (or more commonly, misrepresented) as tasks, so they may have 100 people, but 6,000 tasks to complete.

        More playing with the numbers.

    5. billse10

      @Chris Miller

      maybe the clue is in the "up to". On the other hand, someone's got to pull the fibre, install the PCs, and (*** help us) fix the PCs when the numpties - sorry, end users - screw them up by filling the hard drive with 1Gbits-downloaded crap.

  4. Sgt_Oddball
    Unhappy

    What about us in the cities?

    As a bone of contention with all this you never hear any mention of uprating the speed for those of us living in city centres (rather than in the 'burbs where it's somewhat easier to dig roads up)? It's rather frustraing that most of the flats around were I live have cable instations in the infrastructure of the building but nothing to connect to.

    I fear that with the advent of super fast broadband that again we'll be left out again(when these days there are as many people living in most city centres than live in large towns).

    ADSL as well isn't so bad but again the best we can round Leeds is 14 mb (estimated from BT) which I know is better than some but when you go round student areas they have at least 20mb from cable available on the cheap.

    Unhappy because, well, we should have had 'super fast' broadband over 10 years ago but still nothing.

    1. Semaj

      Show Off

      Dude, I long for the speeds I got back in my old city centre flat (though not the flat itself).

      Complaining that you are losing 6Mb out of 20? You don't know you are born. My connection is meant to be getting upgraded to the 20Mb one in February but I already asked if it'll improve the 3Mb speed I ACTUALLY get and was told it won't because I'm too far away :(

      As for cable? Virgin don't seem to have any interest in building new infrastructure at all.

      Either way it's all a bit crap really.

  5. frank ly

    It could have been worse....

    At least he didn't call him the Vulture Secretary.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Dave Murray

    Get the previous tech first to all urban areas first

    So Hunt wants to trial one Gigabit per second broadband in rural England. That's nice. Maybe we could get C21N in URBAN Scotland first though? Large parts of Glasgow can't even get that and have no idea when BT will bless us with an upgrade despite having plenty of local businesses and homes that could use it.

    1. Wize

      But they think 90% of the UK is in London.

      No one in there cares about the rest of the UK (and I've met a few of them in person that think that way).

      Probably the same reason for some Merkin to call the Reg an obscure site.

    2. ElNumbre
      Stop

      You'll be waiting a while...

      21cn seems to have pretty much been abandoned as a project, to be replaced with FTTC/FTTH and VoIP in the future. So rather than having ADSL2+, you'll have to stick with ADSL(Max) until BT decide to run out a new cable. Just look at the Openreach websites that detail 21cn, they've not really been updated since 2009. I understand the core network has been completed, but the local exchange enablement seems to have died a death.

      Plus, FTTx means that BT can claw back some charges because people wanting to use it will need to pay an installation charge, as opposed to them just installing the new equipment at the exchanges and switching the cables over.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You'll be waiting a while...

        21CN's still rolling on for local Exchange enabling (I'm in London and our Exchange was only updated in July) - see here for scheduled dates http://adsl24.co.uk/networkstatus/wbc/list/

        If on the other hand you're more than 10,000 yards (as the cables run) from an Exchange or you require new cabling to be run, you'll be waiting a while.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Another bailout?

      I thought you guys were going solo... maybe you would have enough cash to put into broadband if you didnt go with the populist vote all the time, you know free student fees, free prescriptions, various other things free.. paid for by the motherland

    4. Stratman

      title

      Now that Scotland has its own gummint and budgets, perhaps some of it could be spent on such infrastructure projects. Isn't that something the Scottish parliament should be sorting out?

      It'll be interesting to see how many MPs representing Scottish constituencies vote to increase tuition fees for English Universities. Especially as Scotland voted to remove tuition fees for Scottish Universities, unless you happen to be English in which case you'll pay.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

    If they really want private investment they should scrap the Fibre tax that effectively keeps everyone except BT and the very large cable companies out of the running.

    Until that is announced, i shall keep pointing and laughing at their pathetic efforts to pretend to seriously address this issue.

  9. nichomach
    Thumb Down

    I'm with Chris Miller

    The "up to" stat sounds rather compiled by the industry standard PFMA ("Pulled From My @rse") methodology, and we do have a hugely different infrastructure task here. I suspect that the the Hulture Secretary hasn't quite grasped that, yet....

  10. Steve Crook

    Better still...

    On 'Start The Week' Andrew Marr introduced an item about the decline of Freudianism 'Freudian Slip' by referring to said incident and saying "of course I can't repeat what Naughtie said, but I can tell you he was talking about culture secretary Jeremy C**t, errr. Jeremy Hunt."

    Queue background laughter.

    1. Richard 45

      No title

      Were there a lot of people waiting their turn to laugh?

  11. Big-G

    who's kidding who here?

    Apparently, the Beeb are going to pay for it! Now, who pays the Beeb all their money? and why are the BBC providing superfab shopping grocery shopping facilities to the masses?

    And did you know that the 'new trial" exchange, is conveniently located close to BT's R&D centre in Martlesham Heath? Presumably, for this reason, The Los Angeles Times reported back in Mar 3, 1994, that "...British Telecommunications planned delivery of interactive multimedia services to homes Trials are under way in Kesgrave England .and that the Tehran Times, reported on |fibre to the Cabinet trials back on Oct 14 2008, ..."BT's Openreach will run a small trial in early 2009 involving 30 homes connected to the Foxhall exchange in Kesgrave, Suffolk. "

    Presumably, the minister received no money from BT for making the BT promotional ad for BBC Breakfast TV & Radio.

    There is presumably more, but this dial up 'not-spot' user has no money left!

  12. Neil_

    Is this needed?

    Is this whole thing actually about giving everyone superfast broadband, or about getting some acceptable coverage to those in the sticks?

    It's important that all people in the country have 'internet access', yes, but how good does that have to be? Is 1MB enough? To browse the web, be educated and not be a ludddite, sure.

    To watch TV-on-demand, maybe not... but should public money be paying for that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Enough?

      People will always find new ways to fill the bandwidth.

      I remember when my 33.6K modem seemed overkill!, then the internet became popular and 500k web pages with flash became the norm rather than what idiotic "Web designers" did because they didnt understand HTML and let Dreamweaver do everything with images instead.

      Currently i get 1.3Mbs, which isnt enough to stream BBC-HD, although it will do the normal service (And its annoying when some of the programs are HD-only). This is a few miles outside of Halifax.

  13. Steve X
    Thumb Up

    Kesgrave?

    Hardly much of a challenge to start in Kesgrave, given they they don't need to do much more than pull a length of Cat6 across the road from the BT Research Labs at Martlesham! Still, all the BT engineers who live there will be happy, I suppose.

    1. Jan 0 Silver badge
      Joke

      What they roll out in Kesgrave is not what the rest of the UK gets.

      I'm still waiting for that 1980s Laserdisc on demand service to be rolled out across the country.

      1. LinkOfHyrule
        Paris Hilton

        I'm still waiting

        I'm still waiting for porn on demand through a Prestel terminal that was promised on an old episode of "Micro Live" that was shown before I was born, that I watched on youtube the other day, that caused me to laugh at the hairstyles and fashions of the early '80s.

        Paris, 'cus she's surprisingly well rendered in magenta block characters!

  14. PTR

    Why?

    Who needs these superfast speeds?

    10mb is plenty fast enought to stream anything.

    I saw one package advertised the other day that, at full speed, you could use your broadband for 20 minutes per month before going over your useage allowance hahahaha

    1. Ragarath

      Sounds to me like your from the old school of thining...

      Like them that thought 2 digit dates would not be a problem (no not the ones that were originally limited with the space), or them that thought you would never need x amount of space on your HDD.

      10mb is plenty now. but what about the future?

      Please try to think outside the box. On the other hand I will believe any of this will happen when I see it.

      1. PTR

        Missing part of my point

        Ok, so 10Mb is good for one or two HD streams, fair enough.

        But what about the crazyness of limiting usage to the point where they can only download 3-4 HD streams per MONTH anyway!!

        Like I said, I saw one package for FTTC that at full speed, would work for 20 minutes before being over your bandwidth allowance for the month :-D

    2. James Hughes 1

      Come on - please think...

      10mb is fast enough to stream ONE stream of HD.

      Not the two, three or four streams that the average household *will* want. The current infrastructure is capable of handling, just about, the demands of today (excluding those people who just don't have BB at all), but entirely incapable of dealing with future demand. This I think is why the 2mb/2012 idea has been scrapped - why spend all that effort getting 2mb to the home on old tech when you will need new tech to get anything above that. You may as well spend the money on getting the new tech in place rather than bolstering the old tech.

      Although I agree on the point about usage limits - they will have to go out of the window with these fat pipes.

    3. The BigYin

      10mb?

      Oh, I dream of 10mb. And I live in a major urban area, but not London.

      Guess I'm sutffed then.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I dream of 8Mb...

        AND I can se the godsdam exchange from where i'm sat. Thats the 21cn enabled Cosham exchange I could possibly hit with my empty coffee mug if I threw it. Via my nice shining new, recabled supposedly 16Mbit line that on a good day managed 2Mbit.

  15. Fluffykins Silver badge

    So what

    We all know he's a minister for Culture and Use of New Technology.

    It just got abbereviated.

  16. John Moppett
    FAIL

    Faster Broadband?

    Well, I live in London, in an area where BT is trialling FTTH. I am so close to the exchange that I am on a direct cable, so can't get onto the fibre. I am SUPPOSED to be able to get 20mb/sec, but am lucky to get 8Mb/sec.

    If this is the best that BT can manage, surely the Government should be looking for a more capabale partner for this project?

    1. Keris
      WTF?

      Millibits?

      "I am SUPPOSED to be able to get 20mb/sec, but am lucky to get 8Mb/sec"

      You're very lucky, then, getting 400 million times the expected speed! The rest of us are lucky to get a quarter of the advertised "up to 8Mbps" (unless they are lucky enough to be on Virgin cable where the speeds can be up to 90% of the advertised speeds).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

        "(unless they are lucky enough to be on Virgin cable where the speeds can be up to 90% of the advertised speeds)."

        And throttled to hell/unusable after 5pm

  17. BoldMan

    Why BT?

    Why does it always have to be BT who get money for this? Virgin has an existing cable network which was installed in the late 90s to lots of places BUT never got rolled out any further. This is a much more robust network (ok Virgin Media customer support is shit, but the infrastructure is good) and has stood the test of time. Why can't this simply be extended using the existing backbones (okay they might need upgrading a bit) rather than building something new again?

    I've got the 20MB Virgin package and routinely get 18-19MB (except when they throttle me for too much torrent activity) Fair dos, I do live in Central London but this is the type of performance that the rest of the country should be getting if these are not just weasel words by Hunt.

    1. dave 46
      Headmaster

      Because Virgin don't want to

      Doing so would (like BT) require them to open up their network to compeition. It serves them better to be able to exploit their existing advantage to try and pay back the stupendous loans it took to create.

      Maybe if the government offered to pay off their debt they'd see an upside, but as that's over £5b I don't see it happening.

      Remember BT got it's network paid for by the state, they've upgraded for sure, but the really crippling work was handed to them for a song.

  18. Chris 235

    I'm wondering...

    ...if there was a spike in traffic accidents at 8 o'clock this morning!

    1. LinkOfHyrule

      There was

      There was, but only in and around Tunbridge Wells.

  19. ShaggyDoggy

    May I ask the question on nobody's lips

    WTF has broadband rollout to do with the minister for Culture ?

  20. jubtastic1

    Is that 1Gb/s Synchronous?

    Or does it self throttle to 8Mbps via a poxy upstream?

    I'm actually looking forward to the blurring of WAN and LAN, gigabit over internet opens up a whole range of possibilities, needs to be both ways though, had enough of the asynchronous pissing contest.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Jeremy Hunt

    Let's face it, when you see him you do have to wonder why the midwife only gave him the one slap.

    1. Sarah Bee (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Jeremy Hunt

      "The midwife put you down and slapped your mother."

  22. Tom 7

    Parkinsons Law

    For the internet says people will expand useful data with crap until your bandwidth is clogged.

    For Xmas I want people not to write PDF documents so I don't have to download 4.5MB just to read a paragraph on page 47, which turns out to be out of date.

    Also when someone puts up a humorous video of a someone falling on the ice I dont want to have to watch an otherwise unemployable idiot tell me from a pretty studio that I'm about to watch a humorous video of someone falling on the ice and then not be bale to break the fucking flash players grip on my computer until they've informed me of the 4 thousand dickheads involved in showing me a humorous video of someone falling on the ice which is only 10 seconds of the 4 minute bloody show!

    If they did that a dial up would probably do but I'm going to have to pay through the nose cos the media etc cant get to the fucking point!

  23. Stratman

    title

    I'm assuming that since a government minister was doing the round with the joyous news, at least some of the £800M will be public money.

    Which leads to the question "What will the other end of the fibre be connected to?"

    Will taxpayer's money be used to pay for investment which will benefit private companies, given that those companies have hitherto refused to provide the self same investment on commercial grounds?

  24. Sceptical Bastard

    @ Blofeld's Cat, nickrw, Steven Jones et al

    OK, OK, so a 'proper' spoonerism of "Jeremy Hunt" is Juremy Hent. OK already!

    But Naughtie didn't say "Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture" - he said (or tried to say) "Jeremy Hunt the Culture Secretary"

    So the confusion of initial consonants was between the words Hunt and Culture. That is a Spoonerism in my book or as near to it as makes no difference.

    Still damn funny whatever you call it.

  25. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Joke

    1Gbs HD video to 40 rural market towns in England

    Purveyors of amateur sheep pron rejoice!

    It's all good. Nothing baaaad about that.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    And again...

    I've just finished listening to Home Office Questions on BBC Parliament (yeah, I know, I should get out more...). One of the MPs was referring to "cuts" but instead managed to insert an N... I stopped dead i my tracks (I was on the PC, so it's a guilty plea with mitigation to listening in the first place) thinking "Did he just say what I think he just said...?" just in time to hear the Speaker tell the Chamber that they didn't hear what they mistakenly might have thought that they just heard...

    ... thus confirming that *yes*, he did just say that... :-)

    I've just looked at Hansard to find out when I can check exactly what gets recorded... the draft should be available tomorrow.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. John Sykes 1
      Coat

      Surely not....

      Nuts? Shocking. He should have the whip removed.

  27. Chris Pollard
    FAIL

    Drop in the ocean

    50m is barely enough to cover one county let alone the whole country.

  28. Captain TickTock
    Paris Hilton

    "up to" 600 000 jobs..

    Is that like "up to" 24Mb?

    Paris, never know what she's up to.

  29. Mark 127
    FAIL

    The HUNT strikes again!

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/06/naughtie-andrew-marr-jeremy-hunt-gaffe_n_792401.html

    Oh dear, the BBC really needs to sort their staff out :)

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The HUNT strikes again!

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/06/naughtie-andrew-marr-jeremy-hunt-gaffe_n_792401.html

    Oh dear, the BBC really needs to sort their staff out :)

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