$40 Billion To Wire the UK With FTTH

I left the UK many years ago, but go back regularly. If I remember correctly all utilities are buried under ground. This must make it very difficult to upgrade a complete network. Unlike here in the USA where they just run fiber along poles and poke another hole in the side of the house.

Also homes are almost exclusively brick or block construction. Another difficulty when running wires inside homes.

Conduit?

Bingo! Just slide the cables in!

not true some places have underground

The report actually develops some deployment costs of urban vs rural environments. Summarized, the really rural costs are approx 4.5x as expensive as urban costs. This adds some facts to the arguments about urban vs rural fiber deployment costs.

This chart shows how different areas are characterized by population density and length of runs from the POPs:

Both are amounts that could easily be recouped in a five to ten year time frame, ergo, no real good reason not to deploy, unless you consider the whiny investors with the casino-mentality about the market a good reason. I'm pretty sure no CEO or President wants to hear them complaining constantly about how the sky is falling because their short term gains are down a couple of points.

Without the "whiny" investors, the companies wouldn't have any money to fund improvements. Somehow a company has to provide returns to investors while also doing upgrades. That is why these large scale improvement projects are spread over many years and not done in shorter timeframes as technology lovers and special interest groups desire.

You misread my statement. "Whiny investors with the casino-mentality," you know, the morons who invest very short term, and freak when one quarter's results come up short of estimates. These folks are very different from long term investors in that they refuse to acknowledge the big picture, demand that company's reinvest as little as possible and consider short terms gains more important than long term stability and sustainable business plans.

Long term investors with a clue welcome reinvestment in a company and are willing to take short term hits in returns for long term growth.

The problem is, they're all buying chips (stock) from the same house. That makes the long term investor more likely to dump the stock with the wild price fluctations. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on why not to invest!

You'd almost need a long term bond issue/that carries a high yield, but even that would need the stability of its common stock.

You will need two things that we don't have:

• Investors with a long term mentality (which, of course, you are denigrating).

• A government with a long term mentality; which means no taxes on the revenues collected for the FTTH services until after the payoff. Can you see government not touching those revenues for five to ten years? I can't.

Oh, and one other thing: Both the cableco and the telco will be expected to build out; but you can't expect the homeowner to use both, so some of the homes won't be paying off for the build out.

I disagree with the parenthetical portion that statement. On the contrary, I was denigrating short-term investors who play the market like the horse races or the roulette wheel. Re-read my posts and you will see that I state that long term investors are what allow companies to invest back into themselves and promote continued growth and stability. Short term investors force companies to do the exact opposite by forcing them to focus on immediate returns and punishing companies that don't maximize immediate returns by delaying or avoiding reinvestment.

Of course. I knew what you meant, but I'm a "Muslim", after all! (Obama's slip of the tongue will actually embarrass the right, you know!)

umm, GBP £28.8 billion dosn't equal US$40.9 Billion.

Lol it almost looks like they did the conversion from EUR->USD instead of GBP->USD

The correct conversion would be £28.8 billion to US$50.7 billion

$50.9B now =)

now go sue all the gamers and pirates you can find and see what and how many want highspeed afterwards

People would flock to 100mbps if they could get it.

Canada is spending nothing.

Hell, nor is At&t, qwest, only one is verzion and that footprint is small plus a hit or miss muni around.

The cost to wire homes with fiber will just keep going up every year and they are eventually going to have to do it.

Just do it.

sure, fiber should be the bulk of telecom infrastructure for both cable and telco providers. however, in a small country such as the uk, wireless broadband could easily cover much of the country with a comparably lower price tag.. so in places where infrastructure is not practical, wireless broadband via wimax or something similar can flood the area with coverage.

also, not all the uk's infrastructure is underground.. if you go onto any web map program and check out street views along highways... they have above ground poles as in other places as well as buried infrastructure. don't think that just because of wwii that the uk buries everything.. they don't, it's just not practical everywhere!

considering what the UK has already spent in wiring for CCTV/network cameras every few hundred feet of motorway and in every obscure village and town center. Kinda freaked me out when I was there last month.