10Mbps for world+dog, hoots UK.gov, and here is how we're doing it

Re: One can only hope...

Yeah I'm 500m from an exchange and about 20m from the cabinet..

The exchange supports fttp but I can't find a provider that will do it (even if I pay)

Zen even told me that fttp won't get rolled out to me because I can get VDSL @75mb/s

As for trenches, while I agree I do quite a bit of work for a company that digs those trenches for open reach gigaclear and virgin... New trenches will be a last resort, they will either use existing duct (which is still ok because they can shove fibre down there) or overhead cable to keep costs down.

Re: One can only hope...

The only sensible way forward is to provide LTE/4G/5G facilities. Must be cheaper than digging.

All new builds which require an access road constructed that is over 10m long should definitely, by law, have to have easy to access segregated ducting with several empty channels under the pavements (or raised cycleways). And standardised formwork to hold the segregated ducting in a pattern wouldn't go amiss either.

And every time you re-lay a road, you can retro-fit, until eventually everywhere will be connected (very few vehicle roads are more than 50-years-old in terms of the tarmac on them, I should imagine, even if the road has been there since the Roman ages).

I can certainly see the attraction of this approach, but you're vastly underestimating the cost of digging up the entire road and it's subsurface and re-routing and re-laying the utilities, compared with just grinding off the top couple of cm of tarmac and resurfacing.

...a vehicular access road, electrical power supply, fibre-optic data feeds, gas lines, sewage and other drainage, "service path utilities" (i.e. for the direct use of street lights, traffic lights, etc. separate from everything else), spare ducting reserved for future use, service hatches/manholes and anything else that every road is going to need eventually....

Perhaps becise all those services have different requiremnts for their holes? For instance, sewerage is always going to have to flow downhill, while gas wants a direct route from supply to house - and electricity wants a different direct line to its substation....

"And every time you re-lay a road, you can retro-fit, until eventually everywhere will be connected (very few vehicle roads are more than 50-years-old in terms of the tarmac on them, I should imagine, even if the road has been there since the Roman ages)."

Sounds nice, but I was at a lecture by a civil engineer who was designing equipment to find all the stuff under the roads. First, some roads, particularly in London, are 'full', in the sense that with sewers, electricity, water mains, gas pipes, phone lines, cable TV, and more, there is no longer any room for digging underneath. Second, there are more or less no maps of this stuff. The recent pipes and cables have been mapped, but in most places in the UK, if you stand on a road and say 'where is the water main here?', the water company won't be able to tell you.

Retrofitting would mean that the water, electricity, sewerage, etc., would be cut off for over a week to somebody, probably much longer. I doubt you'd be impressed if someone said 'we are relaying your road. Move out for a week as you won't have any water or drainage'.

"I still can't work out why this is privatised."

Because over 3 decades ago it became all too obvious that successive governments hadn't been and still weren't prepared to make the required levels of ongoing investment in the old GPO network. The only way to get adequate investment into the network and to recover money from such previous as had been made was to privatise it.

@Lee D

what happens when after a few decades and extensions to the original roads sprawl out the spare capacity is used up with bundled cables where some are still in use?

for roads you can just add more without necessarily adding extra capacity to the original. Water, sewers, gas, electric etc will likely need larger feeder pipes to ensure capacity at the eventual end, With telecoms, the connections typically need to get back to an exchange, adding more customers usually ends up adding more cables back to an aggregation node or the exchange eating up that capacity that was added at the start, which is pretty much the situation we have right now.

Nice idea, already implemented and ultimately needs ripping out and starting again to make fit for current or future purpose.

Rip out the copper, replace on mass with fibre, make OR do it if you want, but get rid of copper, don't run both.

i used to manage sites that once had central boilers feeding campus buildings, when the boilers where decommissioned the boiler houses where turned into frame rooms and the buried pipes / ducts running to each building where reused for multicore cabling for phones, then we ran fibre through them turning the boiler houses to comms and server rooms, Didn't take long for the pipes / ducts to get full, also many where found to have been damaged / collapsed / flooded / vermin homes / lined with that totally acceptable in the 50's asbestos etc over the years etc.

Re: What's "fast"...

Can confirm virgin expanded their network in Manchester about 3 month ago in two separate locations, so they are doing it.

Re: What's "fast"...

Virgin seems to have stopped expanding since they monopolised all the competing cable providers by buying them out soon after their infrastructure was buried. Yet my bill seems to keep creeping up all the time.

Well, Project Lightning continues at the snail's pace you'd expect of both VM, and anything that includes the word "lightning". But the bill increases will continue, and are primarily down to the fact that Liberty Global over-paid for Virgin Media and for the most part have made losses (at group level) ever since, and now face rising interest rates. Last year for example, LG lost $2 billion. That's all going on our bills over the next few years, along with the recovery of VM's share of LG's $18 billion of "goodwill". Things will get worse when LG find a daft-enough mug (like Vodafone) to either buy VM, or roll both companies into one.

I'm hoping that Openreach stop pissing around and roll out G.fast nationally. I don't need gigabit speeds, so FTTP is an extravagance, but as soon as I can get a reliable 120+ Mbps over Openreach, I will abandon Vermin Media's shite customer service and pricey offering.

Re: Bill increase of £20

>per day knowing BT.

£20 per min rounded up.

Re: Bill increase of £20

I blame the article - it would have been nice to have stated if this is:-

- a one off payment

- per month

- per year

etc - too much of the media do this i.e. stating figures out of context - a fail in IMHO.