Re: Fibre to the premises not copper?
Did you read the bit about legacy systems? It's not just software he's talking about. 90% of BT's physical telephony network is legacy. That's a helluva lot of copper that's already in place and proving to still be at least quite useful to most people.
BT can't just wave a magic wand and replace their copper with fibre overnight. It's been calculated by another web site that it would take at least ten years even if the entire country dedicated itself to the task. It's not even just about money. We simply don't have enough telecoms engineers at the moment. Not even if we could rely on immigrants. We'd have to undertake a massive training and recruitment drive. Universities would have to be on board to ensure we have enough courses. Schools would probably have to be on board to encourage students to take that career path.
During the FTTP roll-out you'd probably see no further development of BT's network. Probably even worse standards of repair and longer lead times for new installations. The site that ran some numbers implied that if BT had gone that route instead of DSL back in the late 90s they still wouldn't have finished and those of you currently unlucky enough to be on crappy ADSL would still be on analogue modems.
And you know all those telecoms engineers? I think the site reckoned on 40,000 eventually being required. That's great. But what do you do with those after the ten years are up? Fibre needs less maintenance than copper. So now you have maybe 30,000+ telecoms engineers out of work. Universities laying off hundreds of lecturers and mothballing class rooms.
I don't agree with all that BT does or has done (their proposal for G.FAST still annoys me) but you cannot just ignore the existing local loop nor the huge effort that would be required to replace it with fibre.
The biggest mistake I see is that BT wasn't forced/didn't choose to go FTTP on new builds a decade ago. A few apparently were done but in such a crappy way that copper overlays had to be added to provide the residents with ADSL. Madness!