What I said about BT is correct though, 99.9% of customers access their broadband via 1960's era aluminium and copper telephone cables. Woefully inadequate for the 21C.
Methinks the man doth protest too much. Was 99.9 just used for dramatic effect? Or with some valid analysis behind it?
Guess what I think, with a little stats analysis...
First, and most minor, there are currently roughly 250,000 premises with access to FTTP: getting on for 1%. Takeup runs at the same rate as with FTTC, so around 75% of them appear quite happy with their copper and aluminium. But it is still 0.9-1.0% who could stop using copper/aluminium if they chose to.
Second, and second in significance: Around 7.2 million residential properties have been built since 1978. Extrapolating backwards to 1970, that makes around 9 million premises that weren't even built in the sixties.
Third, and most significantly, the penetration rate of phone ownership in 1971 was only 35%, and there were only 18 million households. That's 12 million existing homes that didn't have a phone line in the sixties.
I make that a total of over 21 million lines that have been installed since the sixties.
Consider me sceptical, but I don't think the GPO overdimensioned their sixties deployment of cable by more than 350%. Especially on the D-side, which is the significant portion for current-generation broadband.
The thing that got me thinking along these lines is that in 1995, we moved into a new-build whose D-side must have been 95% brand new, if not 100% new. More than 2/3 of the estate ended up on new PCP's whose entire E-side will have been new too. That was enough to make me think a little, and go searching for stats on both housebuilding and telephone takeup.