[nyreed]

BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance.

That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades.

Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, who develops the technology?

[panick21_]

Do you have some source on this, sounds interesting.

It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.

[FreezingKeeper]

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

[qcnguy]

It was that kind of delusional decision making that justified the privatization in the first place. Rolling out fiber nationwide in a world where the web had only just been invented and everywhere else in the world was connected via modems would have been catastrophically expensive and supplied bandwidth nobody would have been able to use. The idea the internet could have skipped straight from 33kbaud to fiber speeds is idiotic to anyone who remembers the state of the internet at that time. Most servers were not connected to the internet via fiber.

[n4r9]

Unwittingly a brilliant demonstration of how short-term capitalistic behaviour hamstrings society. Japan, Korea and Hong Kong are way ahead of the UK and much of Europe precisely because of the lack of insight and vision reflected in your post.

[joshuaissac]

> Rolling out fiber nationwide [...] would have been catastrophically expensive

It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper:

> In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper

> we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham

But the British government was concerned:

> BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do

> So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949

This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors?

On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?

[mrguyorama]

The private market made the exact same choice in the 90s, but instead of just being something that cost maybe more tax money than it should, it was hyped up and full of lies and marketing and bullshit and burned tons of cash for really stupid projects and caused a serious recession.

So..... not really a point for privatization here.

[elliotto]

I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force?

In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.