To modernise the UK’s phones, we had to move from old copper wires to digital fibre. The old system was rotting; the change was necessary. But there were two ways to do it:
The engineered way: run fibre cables to the green cabinets at the end of your street, then use existing wires for the last few yards into your house. This is fast enough for 4K TV, Zoom and gaming for 95% of users.
Cost: Roughly £100 per household.
The ‘gold-plated’ way: dig up every single driveway and garden in the UK to run a brand-new glass cable directly into every living room.
Cost: Roughly £1,700 per household.
By choosing the second option, the government turned a manageable £3 billion upgrade into a staggering £50 billion-plus mega-project.
What else could £54 billion buy?
We are currently living through a national debate about where our money goes. Recent reports have highlighted that the UK’s annual benefits bill increase is approximately £18 billion – a figure often used to show how much we could have spent on 15 advanced Royal Navy frigates or 220 fighter jets.
If £18 billion is considered a transformative sum for national defence, consider the £54 billion (combining public subsidies and private equity debt) being sunk into the Gigabit rollout. For the price of ‘full fibre’ to every remote cottage, we could have funded the entire Royal Navy’s modernisation three times over. Instead, that capital is being buried in trenches to provide speeds that most households find totally unnecessary....<<<Read More>>>...
