Thread by @faisalislam

South Korea’s incredible fibre broadband success of 97% coverage...

- state coordinated
- state planned
- not state owned companies
- super competitive market
- mostly privately funded

Reports from SK Govt and from World Bank👇🏾

South Korea experience does make the argument for significantly more strategic even coercive hand of state fixing rules, bank financing and guiding private sector to reach outcomes.

does not make argument for part- nationalisation, or indeed free broadband..

Of course the current UK Government is on this spectrum already - variety of service obligations, acknowledgement that a quarter of market is not economic and would require subsidy, indeed the £5bn promise for “gigabit capable” (NB that is not full fibre for all, 5G for some)...

V interesting question in terms of l-term strategy...

UK was world leader in fibre optics

furious Commons arguments in 1982 pre BT privatisation about rolling this out then, at cost.

Then Govt preferred competition copper/coax/ US cable/ Mercury
Hattersley vs Baker vs Freud

Early 1990s Peter Lilley deriding Labour’s plan at the time to extend a national fibre optic cable network “not left to free market” and “directing” privatised BT to do it, saying it would cost £20bn... saying fibre should “develop at the speed and in the way the market demands”

... of course Mercury became incorporated into what is now Virgin. And the formerly state-run Post Office labs near Ipswich that did so much of the early work on fibre optics, are now part of BT Technology. Mcdonnell does seem to suggest they will come back to state ownership...

Looking back at this - reasonable argument to be had about how and why an insufficiently strategic UK state chose not to capitalise on its technology leadership in this area...

today’s Con PM & his top advisers might indeed share some of that industrial policy critique...