Regardless of what you may think about Labour's broadband plan, it's interesting that there's been more debate about the issues around building a 21st century UK telecoms infrastructure on Twitter alone in past 12 hours, than there has been across UK in past 12 years /1
UK could and should have a full-fibre infrastructure already. Ironically, it was Tory ideology in the 1980s that stopped BT laying fibre over fears it would kill competition post-privatisation. BT sweated its copper assets for the benefit of shareholders instead /2
Labour clearly underestimating cost and complexity of nationalising Openreach - could list at least a dozen unanswered questions - and I suspect it will in practice never happen. But it's good to have the debate, if a little late /3
Free broadband is good retail politics, and ideologically good for Labour's base. Industry concerns are well-founded based on where we are now. But if this stimulates ideas for a more radical rethink of national network infrastructure, that's a good thing /4
For example, Labour's plan would kill third-party investment in infrastructure, but are there unexplored economic opportunities of every household & SME having free full-fibre gigabit broadband? I don't know the answer, but isn't that a debate worth having? /Ends
And as a perfect example, here's a really interesting blog post from the chief engineer at @gigaclear discussing alternative models for the broadband sector, such as franchising: talkunafraid.co.uk/2019/11/nation…
More of this, please!
More of this, please!
@gigaclear ...and another one, great thread here from @davidcevans :
@gigaclear @davidcevans By me: Labour's broadband plan won't work - but let's have a proper national debate to find a plan that does
computerweekly.com/blog/Computer-…
computerweekly.com/blog/Computer-…
