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[Weaver]

My question: considering the current switch to optical everywhere, FTTP replacing DSL and the end of POTS/PSTN, could the exact same switch to optical have happened in the late 1980s? (Yes I know there might be no marketing drive for it because the www hadn’t been invented yet, but just disregard that for the purposes of the hypothesis.) This is about technical and practical capabilities. What do you think?

[Edinburgh_lad]

I don't think so. Openreach has been the monopolist when it comes to telecoms and due to that, slow to invest. Always good to have competition as it keeps the others on their toes.

[gt94sss2]

Yes - and that's what BT wanted to do according to https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

[Weaver]

@Edinburgh_lad - True enough, however this isn’t about money. The hypothetical scenario assumes colossal government funding, as has been happening in recent years.

[Alex Atkin UK]

@Edinburgh_lad - True enough, however this isn’t about money. The hypothetical scenario assumes colossal government funding, as has been happening in recent years.

The point is it was already happening, investment in fibre manufacturing was already ongoing so it ended up being wasted money.

Plus as it was nationalised at the time, profit needn't be a motive for where and when to roll out and once the assets DID make a profit it could go back into network rather than shareholders pockets.

I do not believe any essential services should be private, we're seeing how bad that's going now with energy prices skyrocketing.  Prior to that Post Offices closing as the profit-making Royal Mail used to subsidise them.

I didn't agree with Jermy Corbyn saying we should have a single nationalised ISP, that's too ripe for abuse (plus competition at the ISP level seems to have worked well in the UK), but I do believe the underlying infrastructure probably should be.  Our telecoms network was second to none before it was privatised.

[licquorice]

Yes - and that's what BT wanted to do according to https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784

Hmm, I think that article is a little disingenuous. I suspect the technologies he is talking about are TPON which was purely for telephony over fibre and Syncmux, a forerunner of SDH which was completely non-standard and was doomed to failure from the offset.

[Weaver]

> I didn't agree with Jermy Corbyn saying we should have a single nationalised ISP, that's too ripe for abuse (plus competition at the ISP level seems to have worked well in the UK), but I do believe the underlying infrastructure probably should be.  Our telecoms network was second to none before it was privatised.

Couldn’t agree more, on both points.

[jelv]

Don't get me started on water companies frequently dumping raw sewage in rivers because they haven't upgraded treatment works to cope with demand while still paying out large dividends to shareholders!

[gt94sss2]

I suspect the technologies he is talking about are TPON which was purely for telephony over fibre

Indeed, I imagine the network would have been built on then current technology and optimised for video on demand etc.

[Weaver]

Ah video on demand, I forgot about that. I remember reading an article back in the 1980s which showed that video on demand was impossible (then) because the hard disks in the servers of the time were not up to the job - seek times were hopeless. Of course nowadays you can get a huge lot of servers and throw all that hardware at the problem. Also the video servers probably serve everything out of RAM allocated to cached file systems and io-assist by read-ahead.

You’re right though because video on demand could have been the driver for optical networking which would have been very much necessary in those days before the internet was in homes and smaller businesses, when there was no www and when the internet was something only universities and some vast corporations had heard of. There was no Demon and no PIPEX yet - those UK pioneers showed how much demand there was for email and the www even when the only speeds available were (compressed) 56kbps downstream / 33kbps upstream but without those two applications and, as you mention, video on demand there would have been no case for optical networking for home users.

Question: post privatisation in the mid 1980s, wasn’t BT forbidden from doing telly over their network? I don’t know about future networks as opposed to the then current copper antique network.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Indeed, I imagine the network would have been built on then current technology and optimised for video on demand etc.

Yes, and it would have been (or evolved into) multicast, so WAY more efficient than what were doing now.

Its absolutely insane that live sports today bring the Internet to its knees because its all unicast, wasting a metric buttload of bandwidth.

[Reformed]

*A* switch could've happened however that fibre would've needed replacing had things gone the same way.

There would not have been VOD, that wasn't a thing.

BT would have had to invent their own protocols to push IP down them at today's fibre speeds if they didn't want to swap it out. Would've been a fair bit more expensive than off the shelf.

On the subject of multicast people want to watch things on every and any device. It's presumptuous to assume both that all devices from home router on are multicast capable and that there will be no issues either within or outside the home forcing buffering worst-case, breaking multicast, and variable bit rates, also breaking multicast. The alternative is to permit pixelisation, sub-optimal quality streams and drop frames.

The decision not to run with multicast on OTT traffic was taken carefully based on legal and technical limitations. Even Sky Glass doesn't use it - you need to control everything end to end and not requiring Sky Broadband removed that control.

[Weaver]

My ISP doesn’t do multicast. They did some soul-searching about this.

[craigski]

Its absolutely insane that live sports today bring the Internet to its knees because its all unicast, wasting a metric buttload of bandwidth.

As its not multicast, its never really 'live', sometimes you may be less 'live' than a neighbour watching a different format of same event. It can be annoying during summer with doors/windows open you hear a neighbour cheering 30-60 seconds ahead of what you are watching 'live'.

[Alex Atkin UK]

As its not multicast, its never really 'live', sometimes you may be less 'live' than a neighbour watching a different format of same event. It can be annoying during summer with doors/windows open you hear a neighbour cheering 30-60 seconds ahead of what you are watching 'live'.

To be fair, that's always been a problem.  Even analog the further away you were, the more repeaters you went through, the further delay to your local broadcast.

Of course it gets even more interesting if you're watching via sattelite.

Also the really interesting thing once we went digital, every TVs DVB receiver has a different lag, as well as the TV processing itself.  Heck, TV showrooms often use HDMI repeaters yet you'd be lucky to find any two TVs fully in sync with each other.  Although you can probably get them close with modern high-end sets if you put them in game mode rather than the heavy processing modes used to for TV/movie watching.