Re: Privatisation
@veti
I believe this relates to the contracts for providing new local loop services in urban areas, which were offered to US cable companies to install coaxial (badly in many areas, requiring lots of remedial work to pavements etc.). This strange decision by Thatcher forced BT to abandon its cheaper and faster fibreoptic service, which was all ready to roll, and would have given us FTTH/P 25 years ago. The argument to go with an additional copper rather than fibre optic local loop was justified on the grounds of "competition". In retrospect it seems a strange competition when the winners were offering a poorer technology at a higher price, especially given that there are other mechanisms for allowing competition over local loop services. Compare and contrast with what other countries were doing at the time with their national telecoms companies.
http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
Instead it looks like we will end up stuck with some Frankenstein's monster of power hungry technology that will spew ever increasing amounts of hash over the radio spectrum for many years to come (unnotched VDSL, and G.Fast, I'm looking at you).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
