Thatcher’s War on the Internet – Britain was a once a leader in the global race for fibre optic technology. Then the Thatcher government sold off the factories – and now we have slow speeds, high prices, and workers facing real-terms pay cuts.

33 comments

  2. Much as I dislike Thatcher and everything she stood for it seems like a stretch to blame her for the state of a technology that was barely in it’s infancy when she left office over thirty years ago.

  3. I’m not a fan of her, “Thatcher responsible for X Tenuous Thing” could be a whole Ladybird book series.

  6. 80Mb FTTC, I get about 69-75Mb real world speed. I pay £13 a month.

    Our broadband infrastructure isn’t the best, but it’s not awful and overpriced.

  7. LOL. Slow speeds and high prices. Try living in The Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Australia, Switzerland, Canada or America, they are all more expensive.

    Yes there are plenty of countries cheaper than us, but out of 220 listed countries we are at number 92 for the cheapest

  8. It could definitely be a lot better but why not blame every PM after her for not rectifying that mistake? When it became apparent that fibre optic broadband was an everyday essential people, why did the likes of Cameron or May do nothing? Thatcher was a bad PM for British industry but we need to stop looking back and start asking why our current leaders are doing nothing to reverse her policies.

  10. Both the title and the idea this is all thatchers fault is beyond stupid. Lets go back to BT when it was in government hands in the 1970s.

    BT might have lead the world in telecommunications research and to some degree it is still does. Have that never translated in its ablility to service that out to the community. In part because the company suffered from a lack of investment as being government run limited the amount of investment possible in the company.

    One way in which this was manifested were the huge waiting lists for new telephone lines as British Telecom could not cope with exploding demand from the City. In the words of Baker, the producer-dominated operation meant “there were hundreds of thousands of people waiting for an ordinary telephone connection because only one company could do it. They would send out their employees when it suited them, rather when it suited you.”

    The other issue they dont talk about in this report and one of the key problems is just the vast cost of fibre optic rollout. It would and does cost billions and that cost is still part of the problem today.

    If it had still been in government control it would still have lacked the funds. What this story failed to explain is how the local loop contracts where issued by the then Labour government. I know about this because I worked for the one company that tried to bid for the work.

    The work to roll out the upgrade of the local loop was in part funded by the government by this time Labour. The process was pretty straight forward in order to win the contract for each area a company had to bid for it. The problem was only a few companies and by that I mean just two of which one was BT had the ability to do this work.

    The problem is that the government gave all the bids to BT. It soon became clear that no other company had a chance to win them. It was costing my company to put the bids in for zero return. After 6 months we pulled out leaving BT as the sole company going through this process winning all the contract work. Yes that is right the problem and why the roll out is so slow is because the then Labour government gave all the work to BT.

    Had they made it fair and possible for other companies to deliver the the local loop work it would have driven BT to do it faster and cheaper because they might have lost out on the contract. If you know your getting all the work their is zero reason to speed up that process or make it cheaper.

    For reference the two factories it talks about where not closed at all. They where sold one of which was to the company I worked for. The resources where not exported to asia as claimed we retained the staff. The problem was the labour governement never gave us the work to do the job hence in the end the factory did close.

    However I should point out the elements needed to do the local loop work are not in short supply, they are not expensive. Their is no issues getting the equipment to do the work the problem is you have one company still trying to do if for the whole country.

  11. I don’t really understand what the point of this article is. While our speeds and coverage aren’t quite as good as in France or Germany, we do much better than the Americans and for about a quarter of the price on average. For the vast majority of us here, the internet is perfectly adequate in terms of speed, reliability and price. There’s far bigger things you can slam Thatcher for, such as selling off the North Sea oil and gas, which have had a far more devastating impact on all our lives.

  12. Talk about teaching back into the past. Thatcher left office in 1990 – 31 years ago. I don’t think you can blame her for shitty internet.
    Tony and the one eyed jock could have done something about it or the coalition or the current government.

  13. only in this sub is a story from 30+ years ago posted… because its about thatcher.
    Shall we post some about arthur scargil next?

  14. They did this to all our manufacturing capability and industrial capacity. I can remember watching Question time as a young apprentice engineer and the Tory business secretary outright stating “we do not want manufacturing in this country anymore “ (might have been Majors government by that time)

  17. Worked in the Telco industry for 20+ years for an equipment manufacturer (Nortel Networks), and network providers (O2, Cable and Wireless, and Vodafone). I worked on a huge number of projects as an engineer across Europe at Nortel.

    The deregulation of the Telco market so that the Post Office/BT was not the monopoly was the best thing that could have happened. It meant a lot of startups came into the industry driving innovation like the introduction of Voice over IP.

    The costs of transmission networks plummeted due to fibre based technologies like SDH that reduced complexity over the older electrical based predecessor (PDH).

    Also, the fibre network of the 80s would not be fit for the fibre network of the 2020s. Milton Keynes had a fibre network built into people’s homes. It wasnt suitable for broadband technologies. The most you’d get out of it is the ducting to run cables (which to be fair is the expensive part, and already existed for the electrical network anyway). This is the reason Vodafone bought Cable & Wireless, for their fibre transmission network and associated ducting so that they could remove their reliance on other carriers for cell tower backhaul.

    Also if BT was the monopoly we probably wouldn’t have the mobile networks and MVNOs we have which means we probably wouldn’t have the data speeds we currently have. Data is expensive on mobile networks. I worked on the iPhone project for O2 and they shat a brick when it was launched as they could barely keep network build out ahead of the data usage (more cell density needed). The thing driving them…the fact that the other operators were hot on their heels.

    We probably wouldn’t have decent broadband in rural areas either.

    If you want to see how good a network in a monopoly is take a look at some states and cities in the US where there is, by law, only one network operator. It really is least effort….

  18. Thatcher’s war on the internet? Except she was booted out 6 years before the internet existed… I think that this article is trash – I didn’t read the whole thing though, as the writing pretty rambling. As far as I know, Britain was never really a global leader – it was The United States, Germany and Japan that did all the innovation. Sure it would have been great if the UK had been doing more, but what happened in the 1980s has little to do with the crappy broadband in the UK now – the blame for that goes squarely to the current bunch of idiots.

  21. I remember hearing the story of how Thatcher put the kibosh on this fearing that BT would’ve had a monopoly on the whole thing.

    The companies we were cooperating with in Asia carried on with it though and because of that, by the time we started getting 10mb broadband here in the early 2000’s (which was just about usable) countries like Korea and Japan were already rolling out 100mb+ fibre optic.

    At least we’re sort of getting our act together now, I’m one of the lucky ones that’s jumped to 900mb after being stuck with 32mb for years. It used to take at least half a day to download a 50GB game, now it takes an hour if that.

  23. Although they are pretty soulless and some would say like living in a shoebox, one of the biggest benefits of buying a new build apartment in a city is the internet speed – I get around 600mbps on wifi, and nearly 1gbps on a wired connection – Hyperoptic.

  24. I just moved out of a flat that nearly got 26Mb down and 3Mb up for £26 (EE) a month to a house where I get about 800 down and 50 up for about £36 (Virgin) I just had to accept an O2 sim that’s gathering dust.

  25. Don’t forget Openreach’s flat out refusal to spend any money on infrastructure maintenance or development beyond continually patching the failures. There are areas still using pre-war aluminium lines

  27. No, we don’t have slow speeds or really particularly high prices. There is zero benefit to most people in having insanely high speeds. It’s just bragging rights. The speed of domestic Internet in the UK is more than adequate for the needs of its users. I could get more than double my current speed by paying more. But what I have now is more than I need anyway, so why pay more?

  29. Is this intended as a joke? It’s even more ludicrous than blaming the last Labour government for the current crisis.

  30. All the people taking about gigabit speeds where is this? Impossible to get in my area or in the 3 other areas I’ve lived in the past 4 years. I suspect this is just Londoners acting like they are the entire UK as usual.

    I pay £25 for 60mbps.

  32. I did a week’s work experience with BT back in the nineties and the guy showed me the set top box that they had planned to use with the fibre network they were going to roll out before Thatcher killed it.

    About the only interesting thing that week for me, most of it was riding with an engineer fixing problems in people’s houses. I picked it because it was the only vaguely technical placement on offer.

  33. Has this woman done anything good for the United Kingdom and its people other than fighting a war for some god forsaken Island far away in order to maintain the resemblance of Empire? Honestly how the fuck is this woman not torn apart on a daily basis. There isn’t one thing she didn’t fucked up for you guys.

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