Labour pledges free broadband for all

[zappaDPJ]

Labour has promised to give every home and business in the UK free full-fibre broadband by 2030, if it wins the general election.

The party would nationalise part of BT to deliver the policy and introduce a tax on tech giants to help pay for it.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell told the BBC the £20bn plan was "visionary" but added that "other countries are having these visions and we're not".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50427369

It'll never happen under the current brand of Labour but I wonder where this would leave companies like IDNet if it did.

[Simon]

I can't see it happening as it would obviously put a lot of internet service providers out of business.  For all Corbyn's promises are worth, he might as well promise that we will be harvesting cheese from the moon.

[Adrian]

I'd have thought the country has more important issues to sort out first. All I have seen so far in this election campaign is every party throwing largesse around like confetti at a wedding, largesse funded by our taxes. I want to hear what is going to be done to make the UK a thriving economy that can pay for all these wonderful things without getting us deeper into debt. We all know how that ends.

As for free broadband for all if that means being obliged to use the state provider then thanks, but no thanks. For those of us old enough to remember Post Office telephones we had an expensive unreliable service with little or no choice about the phones we could use and even they had to be bought from the state provider.

I think there will always be a place for quality ISPs like IDNet, it is the service you get when things go wrong that matters and you certainly wouldn't get good service from isp.gov.uk. I suspect their servers would be hosted at GCHQ for convenience.

Privatisation is certainly far from perfect but my experience of nationalisation is that in most areas it is an utter disaster.

[zappaDPJ]

Labour's irrational spending spree could be part financed by their Orwellian 'Land for the Many' initiative which goes way beyond property theft.
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/12081_19-Land-for-the-Many.pdf

[Simon]

I think there will always be a place for quality ISPs like IDNet, it is the service you get when things go wrong that matters and you certainly wouldn't get good service from isp.gov.uk. I suspect their servers would be hosted at GCHQ for convenience.

The problem is, would enough people resist the temptation of a 'free' service, to enable quality ISPs to survive, given that we've seen users move from IDNet simply to save a few pounds a month?  And would any new government lead infrastructure actually allow for the provision of independent service providers?  All hopefully hypothetical questions, but they'd need to be asked.

[Simon]

Labour's irrational spending spree could be part financed by their Orwellian 'Land for the Many' initiative which goes way beyond property theft.
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/12081_19-Land-for-the-Many.pdf

Having clicked that link, I feel I should now virus scan my PC, knowing how good Labour's network security is.   

[nowster]

Having clicked that link, I feel I should now virus scan my PC, knowing how good Labour's network security is.   

Hosted by Cloudflare on WordPress. Pretty much standard. That someone performed a DDoS on them last week is not unusual nowadays.

[Clive]

Nationalising BT would be a disaster for pension funds and small investors many of whom are BT employees.  McDonnell has said that Parliament would decide how much a Labour government would pay for the shares but it would be below market value. 

[robinc]

The initial TV reports indicated that they were talking full FTTP!

Methinks that if in some nightmare scenario they actually had to honor this promise it would very quickly row back to so many conditions, technical problems, geographical limitations etc etc etc that it would become obvious that it's only intended for the ground down huddled masses in their mill workers cottages in the cities. Anyone living in the country will be one  of the stinking rich mill owners who should be paying 99% tax to pay for the new britain.

George Orwell must be spinning.........

[nowster]

The initial TV reports indicated that they were talking full FTTP!

Full FTTP availabilty by 2030 should be a minimum requirement on OpenReach anyway.

If it's subsidised out of taxes, should not the government receive some sort of shareholding?

[Simon]

If services such as 5G takes off, and continues to evolve and improve, then maybe we won't even need fibre broadband by 2030?

[nowster]

If services such as 5G takes off, and continues to evolve and improve, then maybe we won't even need fibre broadband by 2030?

5G won't ever give you the 10Gbps that fibre would give you. (Read up on the Shannon-Hartley theorem.)

[Simon]

5G won't ever give you the 10Gbps that fibre would give you. (Read up on the Shannon-Hartley theorem.)

I wonder, though, if in the same way that many now accept lower sound quality for the convenience of digital music, a speed compromise would be acceptable for the convenience of full 5G coverage?

[nowster]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

[Clive]

   When I was leaving BT for IDNet they told me that my 4K speed was perfectly adequate and could not understand why I wanted to leave.   

[Tacitus]

Nationalising BT would be a disaster for pension funds and small investors many of whom are BT employees.  McDonnell has said that Parliament would decide how much a Labour government would pay for the shares but it would be below market value. 

The proposal is to nationalise Openreach which is a separate company, though fully owned by BT.  My own view is that the 'free' part will be the fibre to the house; you will no longer pay line rental but will still have to pay for the service.  If that is the case then competition would still take place and iDNet will be fine, it's just the infrastructure that would be nationalised.

In that respect it would be no different to electricity and gas.  You don't pay for the wire or pipe to the house, but you do pay for what you use.

[andrue]

5G won't ever give you the 10Gbps that fibre would give you. (Read up on the Shannon-Hartley theorem.)

True but beam shaping technology means that it's no longer as simple as <mast bandwidth>/<number of connected users> because masts no longer have to broadcast the same signal in all directions. So a group of people in one part of the mast's cell can be receiving data on the same frequency as another group receiving different data.

You can't increase the maximum data rate of a mast but you can squeeze more users in (assuming an even distribution) which might be enough to allow radio to satisfy demand and helps mitigate the Achilles heel of radio which is contention.

I retain a preference for a wired connection but the advances in radio technology mean it's not being left behind the way I once thought it would be.

[nowster]

In order to provide 10Gbps using current modulation schemes, you'd need about 1GHz of bandwidth per mast (even allowing for MIMO and beam forming), which means you're working in the 30+GHz frequencies. That's only usable over short distances, with direct line of sight in clear air (a touch of rain or fog, and your signal's gone). Satellite TV in the UK uses frequencies around 11-12GHz.

With dark fibre, your potential bandwidth is limited only by the frequency of the light used (around 200THz for the infra red lasers used in fibre optics).

As to latency, unless someone works out how to communicate faster than light speed, we're pretty close to the limits already (just under 5.4ms per 1000 miles).

[Technical Ben]

I can't see it happening as it would obviously put a lot of internet service providers out of business.  For all Corbyn's promises are worth, he might as well promise that we will be harvesting cheese from the moon.

Not too difficult. Send and return should be only a few thousand from Space X b 2025 (or whenever/if ever they get to the moon). But then, we are living in strange times, when flying pigs on quadcopters and cheese made on the moon, is more likely than someone keeping their promises! 

AFAIK 5g was giving overl 100gbps. However, RANGE is atrocious for it.

[pctech]

Once again showing he has about as much technical knowledge as his colleagues, he knows absolutely nothing which of course explains why they think you can put Government only backdoors into encryption.

I think had this come to pass the only ISP left would of course been BT and at which point I'd have probably opted not to have a connection at home anymore.

[nowster]

There is, however, still mileage in turning OpenReach into a not-for-profit organization. It doesn't need to be government owned.

[pctech]

To my mind it ought to have a similar ownership model to that of some of the Internet Exchange Points, the companies that use it's services all have an equal share.

[nowster]

To my mind it ought to have a similar ownership model to that of some of the Internet Exchange Points, the companies that use it's services all have an equal share.

Usually a "Company Limited by Guarantee". Been there, done that, as a former director of MANAP, the Manchester IXP.