> the company that inherited FOC copper and preferred to squeeze every last penny out of it rather than manage and remove copper from ducts and lay fibre in their place?
You are overlooking the key role Ofcom (previously Oftel) has played: in trying to create a 'competitive market' they prevented BT from investing in fibre, in some respects if BT hadn't already started the upgrade of their core network to fibre, Oftel would have blocked it, instead they prevented BT from deploying fibre in the local loop...
So you can have a "national quality something" at reasonable cost, if you drop the dream of having a "competitive market".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
