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The legacy of Margaret Thatcher lives on

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pemma

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Turns out you can say it's Thatcher's fault that broadband is too slow, even though broadband wasn't around while she was PM.

Tech Radar said:
As you sit on the phone to your ISP's customer service line, listening to half-baked excuses for why you've only got 0.5Mbps upload speed and why you "need" to upgrade to "superfast" fibre optic, it may be little comfort to know that in an alternate reality you'd already have it as standard.

In 1990, a single decision by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a devastating effect on the UK's broadband infrastructure for the next 20 years and for the foreseeable future.

In a little known story about the UK's broadband history, Dr Peter Cochrane, former Chief Technology Officer at BT and all round tech guru, tells TechRadar how the UK lost the broadband race way back in the 90s.

The story actually begins in the 70s when Dr Cochrane was working as BT's Chief Technology Officer, a position he'd climbed up to from engineer some years earlier.

Dr Cochrane knew that Britain's tired copper network was insufficient: "In 1974 it was patently obvious that copper wire was unsuitable for digital communication in any form, and it could not afford the capacity we needed for the future."

He was asked to do a report on the UK's future of digital communication and what was needed to move forward.

"In 1979 I presented my results," he tells us, "and the conclusion was to forget about copper and get into fibre. So BT started a massive effort - that spanned in six years - involving thousands of people to both digitise the network and to put fibre everywhere. The country had more fibre per capita than any other nation.

"In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper and we started a programme where we built factories for manufacturing the system. By 1990, we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham, where were manufacturing components for systems to roll out to the local loop".

At that time, the UK, Japan and the United States were leading the way in fibre optic technology and roll-out. Indeed, the first wide area fibre optic network was set up in Hastings, UK. But, in 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that 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.

"Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. 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, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.

"Our colleagues in Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say.

"What is quite astonishing is that a very similar thing happened in the United States. The US, UK and Japan were leading the world. In the US, a judge was appointed by Congress to break up AT&T. And so AT&T became things like BellSouth and at that point, political decisions were made that crippled the roll out of optical fibre across the rest of the western world, because the rest of the countries just followed like sheep.

"This created a very stop-start roll-out which doesn't work with fibre optic - it needs to be done en masse. You needed economy of scale. You could not roll out fibre to the home for 1% of Europe and make it economic, you had to go whole hog.

"It's like everything else in the electronics world, if you make one laptop, it costs billions; if you make billions of laptops it costs a few quid".

Immediately after that decision by Thatcher's government, the UK fell far behind in broadband speeds and, to this day, has never properly recovered. When the current government came to power it pledged that the UK would have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015 and 90% of homes will be connected to superfast broadband by 2017.

But, as Dr Cochrane explains, there are two things wrong with this. Firstly, the government's definition of superfast broadband is 24Mbps. Secondly, comparing against Europe is pointless. "Western nations blindly compare with each other. There's no point in saying 'we're better than the French, we're better than the Germans' - that's not the point. Are we better than the Japanese, the Koreans and other competing nations?"

"[In Southeast Asia] they roared ahead. The Japanese in particular formulated a plan. While we were faffing about with half an Mbps 'being sufficient' the Japanese were rolling out 10Mbps. When we got to 2Mbps they were rolling out 100Mbps. Hong Kong in 2012 already had a gigabit both ways. In 1999 Japan already had 50Mbps universally and South Korea was comfortably using 4G by 2006. In the UK there's no vision, mission or plan, we're engaged in a random walk into the future".

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
 
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najaB

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That article is good, but not entirely accurate. The early-90's rollout was TPON which doesn't support superfast broadband in itself. However, if the fibre was already in the ground it would've been a lot easier to roll out true fibre broadband services over it.
 

Pinza-C55

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She was a poisonous human being and despite her image of patriotism she destroyed the country she claimed to love.
 

yorksrob

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Mrs Thatcher herself is an interesting character with a clear contradiction at the heart of her beliefs. I have no doubt that she genuinely believed in wider home ownership and share ownership, culminating in what she would no doubt consider to be a democratisation of the economy. Unfortunately, she also believed in less encumbered market capitalism, and what has become glaringly apparent over the past forty years is that unfettered market capitalisation doesn't lead to a greater democratisation of the economy. Quite the opposite - it concentrates resources in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.

If you take Mrs Thatcher's two policies two increase democracy within the economy - the sale of council housing and the privatisation of services, these were effectively state interventions to dissolve state assets. What Mrs T (and all since) have failed to do was to democratise the private sector economy.

Of course Mrs Thatcher wasn't alone. In the example of the OP I believe that the likes of Blair, Mandelson and Brown would have been just as willing to sell out to the American companies because at heart, they believed the old untruth that "it doesn't matter who owns the economy" so long as part of it can be top-sliced and redistributed to the less well off. This does, of course, does alleviate some of the social problems inherant in unfettered market capitalism, however it is a fairly superficial fix that is no substitute to an economy functioning within, and for the whole country.

Those of us old enough to remember the debate in the 90's over clause 4 of the labour parties constitution tend to think of it in terms of public verses private ownership, but really this debate has had a much far reaching effect on the British economy. We've seen the effect on housing, where wealthy individuals and companies appropriate housing that otherwise would have been bought by young workers, thus dispossessing them from the housing economy. We've also seen what happens when large parts of the economy are owned by multi-nationals denominated in foreign currencies in last year's Unilever fiasco. The fact is that ownership matters. This is why the German model of locally owned 'mittlestrand' companies is preferable to the 'everything fore sale' culture we are told is fundamental to a functioning economy.

A company is not just about what tax can be made, but also what contributions can be made to the wider economy, from raw materials (where possible), through design and manufacture, to company profits going into pension funds and the managing director buying his yacht in Poole. The more you outsource/off shore, the more you lose.
 
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DarloRich

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Britain seems still to be a functioning country, despite what you say about it being destroyed.

It must look like that if you are one of the winners. Want to take a trip to meet my uncle or he thousands like and tell him that? The response might not be as polite as you might like.
 

najaB

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She was a poisonous human being and despite her image of patriotism she destroyed the country she claimed to love.
Many of the changes would have happened regardless of who was in power, just it would have been a death by a thousand cuts.
 

DarloRich

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Many of the changes would have happened regardless of who was in power, just it would have been a death by a thousand cuts.

Perhaps - however more thought should have been given as to how areas dependent on traditional heavy industry, like the North East, could have been supported through the change to a new economy and regenerated.

There also didn't need to be the obvious glee, gloating and pleasure that Thatcher and her cronies took in destroying decent working class communities and the industries that supported them.
 

Pinza-C55

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Many of the changes would have happened regardless of who was in power, just it would have been a death by a thousand cuts.

That's impossible to know. As the saying goes "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence".
 

Dai Corner

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Some of them make cars. Some of them have been in and out of work for years. Some of them haven't been able to find decent work.

Can we compare Sunderland's fortunes over the last thirty or forty years with those of Bristol, a city I know well and one of the most prosperous in England?

Sunderland suffered from the decline and eventual demise of coal mining, while Bristol lost its tobacco industry, for example. As I understand it Nissan were 'persuaded' to build their car factory in Sunderland by Government grants while new industries like financial services came to Bristol of their own accord. Bristol City Council built new docks to take the larger ships and ensure its continued importance as a port.

What could Mrs Thatcher's and other Governments have done differently to make Sunderland as prosperous as Bristol is, other than subsidising mining and other industries from taxes paid by Bristolians?
 

pemma

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Did Bristol get any government subsides for it's shipping industry? When ever there's any mention of subsides for Liverpool docks a massive fuss kicks off in Southampton, who don't want to lose any of their business to Liverpool.
 
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Dai Corner

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Did Bristol get any government subsides for it's shipping industry? When ever any mention of subsides for Liverpool docks are mentioned a massive fuss kicks off in Southampton, who don't want to lose any of their business to Liverpool.

I don't know, but I do know that the Port is now in private hands, over £500m has been invested and annual tonnage has tripled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Bristol
 

Xenophon PCDGS

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There also didn't need to be the obvious glee, gloating and pleasure that Thatcher and her cronies took in destroying decent working class communities and the industries that supported them.

I take it that you feel that the emerging third-world countries with a far lower wage structure have absolutely nothing to do with the demise of any British labour-intensive industry. Look at the demise of the Lancashire cotton industry as an example of this.
 

DarloRich

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I take it that you feel that the emerging third-world countries with a far lower wage structure have absolutely nothing to do with the demise of any British labour-intensive industry. Look at the demise of the Lancashire cotton industry as an example of this.

As with most Conservatives their is an inability to understand or even acknowledge the cost, in human terms, of your favoured polices. Why can none of you ever bring yourself to look upon the effects of your desires?
 

Xenophon PCDGS

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As with most Conservatives their is an inability to understand or even acknowledge the cost, in human terms, of your favoured polices. Why can none of you ever bring yourself to look upon the effects of your desires?

When you posted the above in answer to my posting, I see that you chose to totally ignore my stated example of the demise of the Lancashire cotton industry. Perhaps you place the responsibility for that on Ghandi, in lieu of your favourite bête noire, the Conservative Party. Let us look at good old pure Communism practiced by the Pol Pot regime if you want to "look upon the effects of their desires".

I suppose the "Harrying of the North" that was carried out in the immediate years after the Norman invasion of Britain, when crop growing fields were salted and thousands starved to death as a result, is the last deliberate attempt to actually cause death to the populace by those in power in Britain.
 

DarloRich

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When you posted the above in answer to my posting, I see that you chose to totally ignore my stated example of the demise of the Lancashire cotton industry. Perhaps you place the responsibility for that on Ghandi, in lieu of your favourite bête noire, the Conservative Party. Let us look at good old pure Communism practiced by the Pol Pot regime if you want to "look upon the effects of their desires".

I suppose the "Harrying of the North" that was carried out in the immediate years after the Norman invasion of Britain, when crop growing fields were salted and thousands starved to death as a result, is the last deliberate attempt to actually cause death to the populace by those in power in Britain.

Do get a grip Paul.

I know that you are very rich and did very well out of those Thatcher years. Many did not. Many still do not. You seem unable to accept or acknowledge that. Much easier to blame the dirty scum for the problems isn't it?
 

pemma

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There's still clothing within Paul's budget made in northern mill towns.

Examiner said:
Moldgreen-based textile dyeing and finishing firm WT Johnson and Sons was commissioned to finish a £70,000 suit by London-based entrepreneur Alexander Amosu.

The business suit, comprising 5,000 individual stitches and garnished with nine 18-carat gold and diamond buttons, was sold to a mystery buyer in central London.

Mr Amosu, who was last year listed as one of Britain’s most influential black males in the Powerlist 2008 rankings and named among The Times Top 40 Under 40 of rising media industry entrepreneurs, made his name selling mobile ring tones – but is now known as a designer of luxury fashion and technology products.

His £70,000 suit uses an exclusive fabric called Vanquish II, which blends together highly-prized qiviuk, vicuna and pashmina wool.

;)


http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/huddersfield-cloth-firm-creates-70000-5020145
 

fowler9

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When you posted the above in answer to my posting, I see that you chose to totally ignore my stated example of the demise of the Lancashire cotton industry. Perhaps you place the responsibility for that on Ghandi, in lieu of your favourite bête noire, the Conservative Party. Let us look at good old pure Communism practiced by the Pol Pot regime if you want to "look upon the effects of their desires".

I suppose the "Harrying of the North" that was carried out in the immediate years after the Norman invasion of Britain, when crop growing fields were salted and thousands starved to death as a result, is the last deliberate attempt to actually cause death to the populace by those in power in Britain.
Yes, so if you don't like the country under the Conservatives you must want it to be run by the Khmer Rouge, is there a right wing alternative to Godwins Law?
 

Dai Corner

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Strange how you both espouse your love of the North East from Buckinghamshire :D

My earlier post comparing Sunderland and Bristol was leading on to my suggesting that the better educated / harder working / more enterprising people tended to abandon their home cities and move to more prosperous areas rather than employ their talents locally.
 
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