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[Bowdon]

I've read a few times on the forum and in other places, also watching an interesting BT video, about how BT was all set to start installing full fibre from the mid 80s/90s but was stopped in their tracks by Margaret Thatcher.

I've just been reading that a similar story happened in the US with big promises of full fibre yet all the companies did nothing despite the US government giving them billions of dollars.

I think the article is selling a book. But its still worth a read to see some of the American history for full fibre installation.

The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal And Free The Net

By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up.

[meritez]

I thought they were selling a pdf?

This is the third book of a trilogy that started in 1999:

The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells and Info-Scandal, with Foreword by Dr. Robert Metcalfe and tells the history of the break up of the original AT&T in 1984 through 1997. It also documents how the companies changed focus from local utility companies to international communication conglomerates-where the local customer and networks no longer mattered.
Original Printing: Paperback: 508 pages, 664 footnotes.
$200 Billion Broadband Scandal, starts in 1992 and was first published in 2005, and documents how the phone companies made commitments to rewire America received $200 Billion through 2004 from changes in state law to customers, as well as how the FCC decided to close the networks to direct competition. Featured on Bill Moyer's Emmy nominated PBS special, "The Net At Risk", in 2006, it was updated to $300 Billion Broadband Scandal in 2009. It has had over 710,000 downloads, with over 41,000 in just one week --July 16th, 2014.

[Reformed]

Very, very different situation from the United States. That link talks about the misuse of public funds by US telcos while the UK wasn't planning on spending tons of taxpayer money on full fibre ever.

The US 'failed start' is part of a long, long story of US telcos leeching money from county, state and federal taxpayers.

[Bowdon]

It's amazing really how the US as fell behind us.

I remember back in the dialup days Americans used to have the advantage of free local calls. So the BBS community was a lot bigger, and also it was cheaper to get online as long as the ISP provided a local number to call.

Now we're getting access to a higher level of service, especially as we're entering the full fibre era.

[Reformed]

Verizon had 15 million homes passed with FTTP by 2010, it's now about 18 million with symmetrical gigabit available to nearly all of them, 2 Gbps available to some. AT&T are at 16.5 million and building at 2.5-3 million a year with 5 Gbps available to some areas. Frontier are targeting 10 million homes passed by 2025. They have various other smaller full fibre providers.

Almost every US home has either full-fibre or cable service. The majority of the cable offers gigabit, and the networks are being upgraded to be able to provide multiple gigabits per second downstream and gigabit or more upstream.

They're inevitably going to be behind the UK. We've 30 million premises packed into less than 94,000 square miles, ~320 per square mile. They're at 140 million premises across 3.53 million square miles, 39.7 premises per square mile. They have much wider urban sprawl than we do, with huge amounts of land in between those urban sprawls.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Almost every US home has either full-fibre or cable service. The majority of the cable offers gigabit, and the networks are being upgraded to be able to provide multiple gigabits per second downstream and gigabit or more upstream.

Its not quite that simple as a lot of the US is rural but the huge population density of major cities skew the statistics.

I remember watching Louis Rossman and even in New York if you get a crap or good provider depends entirely on what building you are in.  They do not encourage overlap in service offerings so its a lot more common for your neighbours to have good service and you not so much.

He was literally in the middle of New York and in his old building had upload so poor he couldn't livestream properly.

[Reformed]

Entirely true that building owners provide exclusivity to operators. Same goes for entire housing developments there. Building owner negotiates a rate card with the provider and those are your options.

This guy in New York sounds like he had broken cable. It might well have been RCN. We have these issues but less often here.

On the topic of population density as mentioned the USA has cities with very sense centres, so do we, but then enormous urban sprawl out from them. New York City's population density is a bit less than twice Greater  London's, however the metro area including the sprawl is lower than the density of Greater London.

It's pretty expensive to get fibre from San Francisco to New York. A bunch of communities in the US look very similar to our Highlands islands in terms of costs.