[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.

[qcnguy]

No. The idea that more bandwidth to the home=generically futuristic economy and outperformance is exactly the kind of bad central planning that makes socialist countries poor! It's the kind of mistake privatization was intended to fix (and did). The Soviets made the same mistake decades earlier when they overbuilt steel mills.

The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak.

Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.